aimless and had no meaning, that everything was a deception and an illusion, that in its essential nature and results a life of penal servitude in Sahalin was not in any way different from a life spent in Nice, that the difference between the brain of a Kant and the brain of a fly was of no real significance, that no one in this world is righteous or guilty, that everything was stuff and nonsense and damn it all!  I lived as though I were doing a favour to some unseen power which compelled me to live, and to which I seemed to say:  ’Look, I don’t care a straw for life, but I am living!’ I thought on one definite line, but in all sorts of keys, and in that respect I was like the subtle gourmand who could prepare a hundred appetising dishes from nothing but potatoes.  There is no doubt that I was one-sided and even to some extent narrow, but I fancied at the time that my intellectual horizon had neither beginning nor end, and that my thought was as boundless as the sea.  Well, as far as I can judge by myself, the philosophy of which we are speaking has something alluring, narcotic in its nature, like tobacco or morphia.  It becomes a habit, a craving.  You take advantage of every minute of solitude to gloat over thoughts of the aimlessness of life and the darkness of the grave.  While I was sitting in the summer-house, Greek children with long noses were decorously walking about the avenues.  I took advantage of the occasion and, looking at them, began reflecting in this style: 

“’Why are these children born, and what are they living for?  Is there any sort of meaning in their existence?  They grow up, without themselves knowing what for; they will live in this God-forsaken, comfortless hole for no sort of reason, and then they will die. . . .’

“And I actually felt vexed with those children because they were walking about decorously and talking with dignity, as though they did not hold their little colourless lives so cheap and knew what they were living for. . . .  I remember that far away at the end of an avenue three feminine figures came into sight.  Three young ladies, one in a pink dress, two in white, were walking arm-in-arm, talking and laughing.  Looking after them, I thought: 

“’It wouldn’t be bad to have an affair with some woman for a couple of days in this dull place.’

“I recalled by the way that it was three weeks since I had visited my Petersburg lady, and thought that a passing love affair would come in very appropriately for me just now.  The young lady in white in the middle was rather younger and better looking than her companions, and judging by her manners and her laugh, she was a high-school girl in an upper form.  I looked, not without impure thoughts, at her bust, and at the same time reflected about her:  ’She will be trained in music and manners, she will be married to some Greek—­God help us!—­will lead a grey, stupid, comfortless life, will bring into the world a crowd of children without knowing why, and then will die.  An absurd life!’