possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if
someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not,
they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are
still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own
gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as
you can, and absolutely nothing more. Well, these mortal insults, these
jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which
sometimes reaches the highest degree of voluptuousness. I ask you,
gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the
nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day
of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the
first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any
coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation,
a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as
they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant,
and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows
himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows
better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and
others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is
making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do
not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might
moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is
only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well,
in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous
pleasure. As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating
your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake
then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache. I am not a hero
to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person, an
impostor. Well, so be it, then! I am very glad that you see through me. It
is nasty for you to hear my despicable moans: well, let it be nasty; here I