her husband, though she had boasted to
Lavretsky that she alone had educated her children. She dressed her up
like a doll, stroked her on the head before visitors and called her a
clever child and a darling to her face, and that was all. Any kind of
continuous care was too exhausting for the indolent lady. During her
father's lifetime, Lisa was in the hands of a governess, Mademoiselle
Moreau from Paris, after his death she passed into the charge of Marfa
Timofyevna. Marfa Timofyevna the reader knows already; Mademoiselle
Moreau was a tiny wrinkled creature with little bird-like ways and a
bird's intellect. In her youth she had led a very dissipated life, but
in old age she had only two passions left--gluttony and cards. When she
had eaten her fill, and was neither playing cards nor chattering, her
face assumed an expression almost death-like. She was sitting, looking,
breathing--yet it was clear that there was not an idea in her head. One
could not even call her good-natured. Birds are not good-natured. Either
as a result of her frivolous youth or of the air of Paris, which she had
breathed from childhood, a kind of cheap universal scepticism had found
its way into her, usually expressed by the words: tout ca c'est des
betises. She spoke ungrammatically, but in a pure Parisian jargon, did
not talk scandal and had no caprices--what more can one desire in a
governess? Over Lisa she had little influence; all the stronger was the
influence on her of her nurse, Agafya Vlasyevna.

This woman's story was remarkable. She came of a peasant family. She was
married at sixteen to a peasant; but she was strikingly different from
her peasant sisters. Her father had been twenty years starosta, and had
made a good deal of money, and he spoiled her. She was exceptionally
beautiful, the best-dressed girl in the whole district, clever,
ready with her tongue, and daring. Her master Dmitri Pestov, Marya
Dmitrievna's father, a man of modest and gentle character, saw her one
day at the threshing-floor, talked to her and fell passionately in love
with her. She was soon left a widow; Pestov, though he was a married
man, took her into his house and dressed her like a lady. Agafya at
once adapted herself to her new position, just as if she had never lived
differently all her life. She grew fairer and plumper; her arms grew
as "floury white" under her muslin-sleeves as a merchant's lady's; the
samovar never left her table; she would wear nothing