One juryman told the story of how he was nearly drowned; another described how, in a place where there were neither doctors nor chemists, he had one night poisoned his own son through giving him zinc vitriol by mistake for soda.  The child did not die, but the father nearly went out of his mind.  A third, a man not old but in bad health, told how he had twice attempted to commit suicide:  the first time by shooting himself and the second time by throwing himself before a train.

The fourth, a foppishly dressed, fat little man, told us the following story: 

“I was not more than twenty-two or twenty-three when I fell head over ears in love with my present wife and made her an offer.  Now I could with pleasure thrash myself for my early marriage, but at the time, I don’t know what would have become of me if Natasha had refused me.  My love was absolutely the real thing, just as it is described in novels—­frantic, passionate, and so on.  My happiness overwhelmed me and I did not know how to get away from it, and I bored my father and my friends and the servants, continually talking about the fervour of my passion.  Happy people are the most sickening bores.  I was a fearful bore; I feel ashamed of it even now. . . .

“Among my friends there was in those days a young man who was beginning his career as a lawyer.  Now he is a lawyer known all over Russia; in those days he was only just beginning to gain recognition and was not rich and famous enough to be entitled to cut an old friend when he met him.  I used to go and see him once or twice a week.  We used to loll on sofas and begin discussing philosophy.

“One day I was lying on his sofa, arguing that there was no more ungrateful profession than that of a lawyer.  I tried to prove that as soon as the examination of witnesses is over the court can easily dispense with both the counsels for the prosecution and for the defence, because they are neither of them necessary and are only in the way.  If a grown-up juryman, morally and mentally sane, is convinced that the ceiling is white, or that Ivanov is guilty, to struggle with that conviction and to vanquish it is beyond the power of any Demosthenes.  Who can convince me that I have a red moustache when I know that it is black?  As I listen to an orator I may perhaps grow sentimental and weep, but my fundamental conviction, based for the most part on unmistakable evidence and fact, is not changed in the least.  My lawyer maintained that I was young and foolish and that I was talking childish nonsense.  In his opinion, for one thing, an obvious fact becomes still more obvious through light being thrown upon it by conscientious, well-informed people; for another, talent is an elemental force, a hurricane capable of turning even stones to dust, let alone such trifles as the convictions of artisans and merchants of the second guild.  It is as hard for human weakness to struggle against talent as to look at the sun without winking, or to stop the wind.  One simple mortal by the power of the word turns thousands of convinced savages to Christianity; Odysseus was a man of the firmest convictions, but he succumbed to the Syrens, and so on.  All history consists of similar examples, and in life they are met with at every turn; and so it is bound to be, or the intelligent and talented man would have no superiority over the stupid and incompetent.