Ivan was in his twentieth year when this unexpected blow struck him.  We speak of the Princess’s marriage, not her death.  In his aunt’s house, in which he had suddenly passed from the position of a wealthy heir to that of a hanger-on, he would not slay any longer.  In Petersburg, the society in which he had grown up closed its doors upon him.  For the lower ranks of the public service, and the laborious and obscure life they involved, he felt a strong repugnance.  All this, it must be remembered, took place in the earliest part of the reign of the Emperor Alexander I[A].  He was obliged, greatly against his will, to return to his father’s country house.  Dirty, poor, and miserable did the paternal nest seem to him.  The solitude and the dullness of a retired country life offended him at every step.  He was devoured by ennui; besides, every one in the house, except his mother, regarded him with unloving eyes.  His father disliked his metropolitan habits, his dress-coats and shirt-frills, his books, his flute, his cleanliness—­from which he justly argued that his son regarded him with a feeling of aversion.  He was always grumbling at his son, and complaining of his conduct.

[Footnote A:  When corruption was the rule in the public service.]

“Nothing we have here pleases him,” he used to say.  “He is so fastidious at table, he eats nothing.  He cannot bear the air and the smell of the room.  The sight of drunken people upsets him; and as to beating anyone before him, you musn’t dare to do it.  Then he won’t enter the service; his health is delicate, forsooth!  Bah!  What an effeminate creature!—­and all because his head is full of Voltaire!” The old man particularly disliked Voltaire, and also the “infidel” Diderot, although he had never read a word of their works.  Reading was not in his line.

Peter Andreich was not mistaken.  Both Diderot and Voltaire really were in his son’s head; and not they alone.  Rousseau and Raynal and Helvetius also, and many other similar writers, were in his head; but in his head only.  Ivan Petrovich’s former tutor, the retired Abbe and encyclopaedist, had satisfied himself with pouring all the collective wisdom of the eighteenth century over his pupil; and so the pupil existed, saturated with it.  It held its own in him without mixing with his blood, without sinking into his mind, without resolving into fixed convictions.  And would it be reasonable to ask for convictions from a youngster half a century ago, when we have not even yet acquired any?

Ivan Petrovich disconcerted the visitors also in his father’s house.  He was too proud to have anything to do with them; they feared him.  With his sister Glafira, too, who was twelve years his senior, he did not at all agree.  This Glafira was a strange being.  Plain, deformed, meagre—­with staring and severe eyes, and with thin, compressed lips—­she, in her face and her voice, and in her angular and quick movements, resembled her