Lyapinsky lodging-house. This house is huge. It consists of four
sections. In the upper stories are the men's quarters; in the lower,
the women's. I first entered the women's place; a vast room all
occupied with bunks, resembling the third-class bunks on the railway.
These bunks were arranged in two rows, one above the other. The
women, strange, tattered creatures, both old and young, wearing
nothing over their dresses, entered and took their places, some below
and some above. Some of the old ones crossed themselves, and uttered
a petition for the founder of this refuge; some laughed and scolded.
I went up-stairs. There the men had installed themselves; among them
I espied one of those to whom I had given money. [On catching sight
of him, I all at once felt terribly abashed, and I made haste to
leave the room. And it was with a sense of absolute crime that I
quitted that house and returned home. At home I entered over the
carpeted stairs into the ante-room, whose floor was covered with
cloth; and having removed my fur coat, I sat down to a dinner of five
courses, waited on by two lackeys in dress-coats, white neckties, and
white gloves.

Thirty years ago I witnessed in Paris a man's head cut off by the
guillotine in the presence of thousands of spectators. I knew that
the man was a horrible criminal. I was acquainted with all the
arguments which people have been devising for so many centuries, in
order to justify this sort of deed. I knew that they had done this
expressly, deliberately. But at the moment when head and body were
severed, and fell into the trough, I groaned, and apprehended, not
with my mind, but with my heart and my whole being, that all the
arguments which I had heard anent the death-penalty were arrant
nonsense; that, no matter how many people might assemble in order to
perpetrate a murder, no matter what they might call themselves,