noisy and commercial; there is little spiritual peace,’ one secluded thinker has complained. ‘So be it; but the rumble of the waggons that bring bread to starving humanity is better, maybe, than spiritual peace,’ another thinker, who is always moving among his fellows, answers him triumphantly, and walks away from him conceitedly. But, vile as I am, I don’t believe in the waggons that bring bread to humanity. For the waggons that bring bread to humanity, without any moral basis for conduct, may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is brought; so it has been already….”
“The waggons can coldly exclude?” some one repeated.
“And so it has been already,” repeated Lebedyev, not deigning to notice the question. “We’ve already had Malthus, the friend of humanity. But the friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is the devourer of humanity, to say nothing of his conceit; for, wound the vanity of any one of these numerous friends of humanity, and he’s ready to set fire to the world out of petty revenge — like all the rest of us, though, in that, to be fair; like myself, vilest of all, for I might well be the first to bring the fuel and run away myself. But that’s not the point again!”
“What is it, then?”
“You’re boring us.”
“The points lie in what follows, in an anecdote of the past; for I absolutely must tell you a story of ancient times. In our times, and in our country, which I trust you love, gentlemen, as I do, for I am ready to shed the last drop of my blood for…”
“Get on, get on!”
“In our country, as well as in the rest of Europe, widespread and terrible famines visit humanity, as far as they can be reckoned, and as far as I can remember, not oftener now than four times a century, in other words, every twenty-five years. I won’t dispute the exact number, but they are comparatively rare.”
“Compared with what?”
“Compared with the twelfth century, or those near it, before or after. For then, as they write and as writers assert, widespread famines came usually every two years, or at least every three years, so that in such a position of affairs men even had recourse to cannibalism, though they kept it secret. One of these cannibals announced, without being forced to do so, as he was approaching old age, that in the course of his long and needy life he had killed and eaten by himself in dead secret sixty monks and a few infant laymen, a matter of six, but not more. That is extraordinarily few compared with the immense mass of ecclesiastics he had consumed. Grown-up laymen, it appeared, he had never approached with that object.”
“That can’t be true!” cried the president himself, the general, in an almost resentful voice. “I often reason and dispute with him, gentlemen, always about such thinqs; but usually he brinqs forward such absurd stories, that it makes your ears ache, without a shred of probability.”
“General, remember the siege of Kars! And let me tell you, gentlemen, that my story is the unvarnished truth. I will only observe that every reality, even though it has its unalterable laws, is almost always difficult to believe and improbable, and sometimes, indeed, the more real it is the more improbable it is.”
“But could he eat sixty monks?” they asked, laughing round him.
“He didn’t eat them all at once, that’s evident. But if he consumed them in the course of fifteen or twenty years, it is perfectly comprehensible and natural….”
“Natural?”
“Yes, natural,” Lebedyev repeated, with pedantic persistence. “Besides, a Catholic monk is, from his very nature, easily led and inquisitive, and it wouldn’t be hard to lure him into the forest, or to some hidden place, and there to deal with him as aforesaid. But I don’t deny that the number of persons devoured seems excessive to the point of greediness.”
“It may be true, gentlemen,” observed Myshkin suddenly.
Till then he had listened in silence to the disputants and had taken no part in the conversation; he had often joined heartily in the general outbursts of laughter. He was evidently delighted that they were so gay and so noisy; even that they were drinking so much. He might perhaps not have uttered a word the whole evening, but suddenly he seemed moved to speak. He spoke with marked gravity, so that every one turned to him at once with interest.
“What I mean, gentlemen, is, that famines used to be frequent. I have heard of that, though I know little history. But I think they must have been. When I was among the Swiss mountains I was surprised at the ruins of feudal castles, built on the mountain slopes or precipitous rocks at least half a mile high (which means some miles of mountain path). You know what a castle is: a perfect mountain of stones. They must have meant an awful, incredible labour. And, of course, they were all built by the poor people, the vassals. Besides which, they had to pay all the taxes and support the priesthood. How could they provide for themselves and till the land? They must have been few in number at that time; they died off terribly from famine, and there may have been literally nothing to eat. I’ve sometimes wondered, indeed, how it was that the people didn’t become extinct altogether; how it was that nothing happened to them, and how they managed to endure it and survive. No doubt Lebedyev is right in saying that there were cannibals, and perhaps many of them; only I don’t understand why he brought monks into the story, and what he means by that.”
“Probably because in the twelfth century it was only the monks who were fit to eat, because they were the only people that were fat,” observed Gavril Ardalionovitch.
“A magnificent and true idea!” cried Lebedyev, “seeing he didn’t touch laymen — not one layman to sixty ecclesiastics; and that’s a frightful thought, an historical thought, a statistical thought indeed, and such facts make history for one who understands. For it follows with arithmetical exactitude that the ecclesiastics lived at least sixty times as happily and comfortably as all the rest of mankind at that period. And perhaps they were at least sixty times as fat. . .
“An exaggeration! An exaggeration, Lebedyev!” they all laughed.
“I agree that is an historical thought; but what are you leading up to?” Myshkin inquired again. (He spoke with such gravity and so absolutely without mocking or jeering at Lebedyev, at whom all the rest were laughing, that in contrast with the general tone his words could not help sounding comic. They were almost on the verge of laughing at him, but he did not notice it.)
“Don’t you see, prince, that he’s a madman?” said “Vfevgeny Pavlovitch, bending down to him. “I was told here just now that he’s mad on being a lawyer and making lawyers’ speeches, and wants to go in for an examination. I’m expecting a glorious burlesque.”
“I am leading up to vast issues,” Lebedyev was roaring meanwhile. “But let us first of all analyse the psychological and legal position of the criminal. We see that the criminal, or, as I might call him, my client, in spite of the impossibility of finding any other comestible, several times in the course of his interesting career, showed signs of a desire to repent and shun the clergy. We see this clearly from the facts. It will be remembered that he did at anv rate consume five or six infants — a number relatively insignificant, yet remarkable from another point of view. It is evident that, tormented by terrible pangs of conscience (for my client is a religious man and conscientious, as I shall prove later), and to minimise his sin as far as possible, he, by way of experiment, changed his diet from the clergy to the laity. That it was by way of experiment is beyond doubt again; for had it been simply for the sake of gastronomic variety, the number six would be too insignificant. Why only six? Why not thirty? (Half of one and half of the other.) But if it were only an experiment, arising simply from despair and the fear of sacrilege, and of offending the church, the number six becomes quite intelligible; for six attempts to appease the pangs of conscience are more than enough, as the attempts could not but be unsuccessful. And in the first place, in my opinion, an infant is too small — that is, insufficient, so that he would need three times or five times as many infant laymen for the same period of time as one ecclesiastic. So that the sin, though less on the one side, would be greater on the other — not in quality, but in quantity. In this reflection, gentlemen,
I am of course entering into the feelings of a criminal of the twelfth century. As for me, a man of the nineteenth century, I should have reasoned differently, I beg to inform you; so you need not grin at me, gentlemen, and it’s not at all the thing for you to do, general. In the second place, an infant, in my opinion, would be not sufficiently nutritious, and perhaps too sweet and mawkish; so that his appetite would be unsatisfied, while the pangs of conscience would remain. Now for the conclusion, the finale, gentlemen, in which lies the solution of one of the greatest questions of that age and of this! The criminal ends by going and giving information against himself to