me! Why are they always
anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is
their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice--that's what it
is--they are all full of malice, malice!

"Whose fault is it that they are all miserable, that they don't know how
to live, though they have fifty or sixty years of life before them? Why
did that fool allow himself to die of hunger with sixty years of unlived
life before him?

"And everyone of them shows his rags, his toil-worn hands, and yells in
his wrath: 'Here are we, working like cattle all our lives, and always
as hungry as dogs, and there are others who do not work, and are fat and
rich!' The eternal refrain! And side by side with them trots along some
wretched fellow who has known better days, doing light porter's work
from morn to night for a living, always blubbering and saying that
'his wife died because he had no money to buy medicine with,' and his
children dying of cold and hunger, and his eldest daughter gone to the
bad, and so on. Oh! I have no pity and no patience for these fools of
people. Why can't they be Rothschilds? Whose fault is it that a man has
not got millions of money like Rothschild? If he has life, all this must
be in his power! Whose fault is it that he does not know how to live his
life?

"Oh! it's all the same to me now--NOW! But at that time I would soak my
pillow at night with tears of mortification, and tear at my blanket in
my rage and fury. Oh, how I longed at that time to be turned out--ME,
eighteen years old, poor, half-clothed, turned out into the street,
quite alone, without lodging, without work, without a crust of bread,
without relations, without a single acquaintance, in some large
town--hungry, beaten (if you like), but in good health--and THEN I would
show them--

"What would I show them?

"Oh, don't think that I have no sense of my own humiliation! I have
suffered already in reading so far. Which of you all does not think me a
fool at this moment--a young fool who knows nothing of life--forgetting
that to live as I have lived these last six months is to live longer
than grey-haired old men. Well, let them laugh, and say it is all
nonsense, if they please. They may say it is all fairy-tales, if they
like; and I have spent whole nights telling myself fairy-tales. I
remember them all. But how can I tell fairy-tales now? The time for them
is over. They amused me when I found that there was not even time for me
t