hat I loved abstruse German music. I began to
go into raptures whenever Lubotshka played the "Sonate Pathetique," and
although (if the truth be told) that work had for years driven me to the
verge of distraction, I set myself to play Beethoven, and to talk of him
as "Beethoven." Yet through all this chopping and changing and pretence
(as I now conceive) there may have run in me a certain vein of talent,
since music sometimes affected me even to tears, and things which
particularly pleased me I could strum on the piano afterwards (in a
certain fashion) without the score; so that, had any one taught me at
that period to look upon music as an end, a grace, in itself, and
not merely as a means for pleasing womenfolk with the velocity and
pseudo-sentiment of one's playing, I might possibly have become a
passable musician.

The reading of French novels (of which Woloda had brought a large store
with him from Moscow) was another of my amusements that summer. At that
period Monte Cristo and Taine's works had just appeared, while I also
revelled in stories by Sue, Dumas, and Paul de Kock. Even their most
unnatural personages and events were for me as real as actuality, and
not only was I incapable of suspecting an author of lying, but, in
my eyes, there existed no author at all. That is to say, the various
personages and events of a book paraded themselves before me on the
printed page as personages and events that were alive and real; and
although I had never in my life met such characters as I there read
about, I never for a second doubted that I should one day do so. I
discovered in myself all the passions described in every novel, as
well as a likeness to all the characters--heroes and villains
impartially--who figured therein, just as a suspicious man finds in
himself the signs of every possible disease when reading a book on
medicine. I took pleasure both in the cunning designs, the glowing
sentiments, the tumultuous events, and the character-drawing of these
works. A good man was of the goodness, a bad man of the badness,
possible only to the imagination of early youth. Likewise I found great
pleasure in the fact that it was all written in French, and that I could
lay to heart the fine words which the fine heroes spoke, and recall them
for use some day when engaged in some noble deed. What quantities of
French phrases I culled from those books for Kolpikoff's benefit if I
should ever meet him again, as well as for HERS, w