hen at length I should
find her and reveal to her my love! For them both I prepared speeches
which should overcome them as soon as spoken! Upon novels, too, I
founded new ideals of the moral qualities which I wished to attain.
First of all, I wished to be NOBLE in all my deeds and conduct (I use
the French word noble instead of the Russian word blagorodni for the
reason that the former has a different meaning to the latter--as
the Germans well understood when they adopted noble as nobel and
differentiated it from ehrlich); next, to be strenuous; and lastly,
to be what I was already inclined to be, namely, comme il faut. I even
tried to approximate my appearance and bearing to that of the heroes who
possessed these qualities. In particular I remember how in one of the
hundred or so novels which I read that summer there was a very strenuous
hero with heavy eyebrows, and that I so greatly wished to resemble him
(I felt that I did so already from a moral point of view) that one
day, when looking at my eyebrows in the glass, I conceived the idea of
clipping them, in order to make them grow bushier. Unfortunately, after
I had started to do so, I happened to clip one spot rather shorter than
the rest, and so had to level down the rest to it-with the result
that, to my horror, I beheld myself eyebrow-less, and anything but
presentable. However, I comforted myself with the reflection that my
eyebrows would soon sprout again as bushy as my hero's, and was only
perplexed to think how I could explain the circumstance to the household
when they next perceived my eyebrow-less condition. Accordingly I
borrowed some gunpowder from Woloda, rubbed it on my temples, and set
it alight. The powder did not fire properly, but I succeeded in singeing
myself sufficiently to avert all suspicion of my pranks. And, indeed,
afterwards, when I had forgotten all about my hero, my eyebrows grew
again, and much thicker than they had been before.

XXXI. "COMME IL FAUT"

SEVERAL times in the course of this narrative I have hinted at an idea
corresponding to the above French heading, and now feel it incumbent
upon me to devote a whole chapter to that idea, which was one of the
most ruinous, lying notions which ever became engrafted upon my life by
my upbringing and social milieu.

The human race may be divided into several categories--rich and poor,
good and bad, military and civilian, clever and stupid, and so forth,
and so forth. Yet each man h