Abel Larinski transported himself, in thought, to the tavern in which Samuel Brohl had spent his first youth, and which was as familiar to him as though he had lived there himself.  The smoky hovel rose before him:  he could smell the odour of garlic and tallow; he could see the drunken guests—­some seated round the long table, others lying under it—­the damp and dripping walls, and the rough, dirty ceiling.  He remembered a panel in the wainscoting against which a bottle had been broken, in the heat of some dispute; it had left a great stain of wine that resembled a human face.  He remembered, too, the tavern-keeper, a little man with a dirty, red beard, whose demeanour was at once timid and impudent.  He saw him as he went and came, then saw him suddenly turn, lift the end of his caftan and wipe his cheek on it.  What had happened?  An insolvent debtor had spit in his face; he bore it smilingly.  This smile was more repulsive to Count Abel than the great stain that resembled a human face.

“Children should be permitted to choose their fathers,” he thought.  And yet this poor Samuel Brohl came very near living as happy and contented in the paternal mire as a fish in water.  Habit and practice reconcile one even to dirt; and there are people who eat and digest it.  What made Samuel Brohl think of reading Shakespeare?  Poets are corrupters.

The way it happened was this.  Samuel had picked up, somewhere, a volume which had dropped from a traveller’s pocket.  It was a German translation of The Merchant of Venice.  He read it, and did not understand it; he reread it, and ended by understanding it.  It produced a wild confusion of ideas in his mind; he thought that he was becoming insane.  Little by little, the chaos became less tumultuous; order began to reign, light to dawn.  Samuel Brohl felt that he had had a film over his eyes, and that it was now removed.  He saw things that he never had seen before, and he felt joy mingled with terror.  He learned The Merchant of Venice by heart.  He shut himself up in the barn, so that he might cry out with Shylock:  “Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?  If you prick us, do we not bleed?  If you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” He repeated, too, with Lorenzo: 

     “Sit, Jessica.  Look how the floor of heaven
     Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. 
     There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
     But in his motion like an angel sings,
     Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins: 
     Such harmony is in immortal souls;
     But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
     Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”