but Turgenieff's, I believe, but the idea certainly belonged to
him. He got his programme of agricultural communism from Herzen, and
his destructive radicalism from Pougatcheff, but he did not stop there.
I mean that he went on to evil for the sake of evil. Herzen wished for
the happiness of the Slav peasant; Pougatcheff wanted to be elected
Emperor, but all that Bakounine wanted was to overthrow the actual
order of things, no matter by what means, and to replace social
concentration by a universal upheaval.

"It was the dream of a Tartar; it was true Nihilism pushed to extreme
and practical conclusions. It was, in a word, the applied philosophy of
chance, the indeterminate end of anarchy. Monstrous it may be, but
grand in its monstrosity!

"And you must note that the typical man of action so despised by the
Countess was, in Bakounine, the gigantic dreamer whom I have just shown
to you. His dream did not remain a dream, but began to be realized. It
was by the care of Bakounine that the Nihilistic party became an
entity; a party in which there is a little of everything, you know, but
on the whole, a formidable party, the advanced guard of which is true
Nihilism, whose object is nothing less than to destroy the Western
world, to see it blossom from under the ruins of a general dispersion,
the last conception of modern Tartarism.

"I never saw Bakounine again, for the Countess's conquest would have
been too dearly bought by any attempt to act a comedy with this
'Old-Man-of-the-Mountain.' And besides that, after this visit, poor
Countess Satan appeared to me quite silly. Her famous Satanism was
nothing but the flicker of a spirit-lamp, after the general
conflagration of which the other had dreamed. She had certainly shown
herself very silly, when she could not understand that prodigious
monster. And as she had seduced me only by her intellect and her
perversity, I was disgusted as soon as she laid aside that mask. I left
her without telling her of my intention, and never saw her again,
either.

"No doubt they both took me for a spy from the 'Third Section of the
Imperial Chancellery.' In that case, they must have thought me very
clever to have escaped discovery, and all I have to do is to look out,
lest any affiliated members of their society recognize me!"

Then he smiled and, turning to the waiter who had just come in, said:
"Open another bottle of champagne, and make the cork pop! It will, at
any rate, remind us o