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 Abbé 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