disposed of by sale, and he spoilt his household.  His large, warm, and dirty rooms were full of people of small degree, known and unknown, who swarmed in from all sides like cockroaches.  All these visitors gorged themselves with whatever came in their way, drank their fill to intoxication, and carried off what they could, extolling and glorifying their affable host.  As for their host, when he was out of humor with them, he called them scamps and parasites; but when deprived of their company, he soon found himself bored.

[Footnote A:  Male serfs.]

The wife of Peter Andreich was a quiet creature whom he had taken from a neighboring family in acquiescence with his father’s choice and command.  Her name was Anna Pavlovna.  She never interfered in any thing, received her guests cordially, and went out into society herself with pleasure—­although “it was death” to her, to use her own phrase, to have to powder herself.  “They put a felt cap on your head,” she used to say in her old age; “they combed all your hair straight up on end, they smeared it with grease, they strewed it with flour, they stuck it full of iron pins; you couldn’t wash it away afterwards.  But to pay a visit without powdering was impossible.  People would have taken offence.  What a torment it was!” She liked to drive fast, and was ready to play at cards from morning until evening.  When her husband approached the card-table, she was always in the habit of covering with her hand the trumpery losses scored up against her; but she had made over to him, without reserve, all her dowry, all the money she had.  She brought him two children—­a son named Ivan, our Fedor’s father, and a daughter, Glafira.[A]

[Footnote A:  The accent should be on the second syllable of this name.]

Ivan was not brought up at home, but in the house of an old and wealthy maiden aunt, Princess Kubensky.  She styled him her heir (if it had not been for that, his father would not have let him go), dressed him like a doll, gave him teachers of every kind, and placed him under the care of a French tutor—­an ex-abbe, a pupil of Jean Jacques Rousseau—­a certain M. Courtin de Vaucelles an adroit and subtle intriguer—­“the very fine fleur of the emigration,” as she expressed herself; and she ended by marrying this fine fleur when she was almost seventy years old.  She transferred all her property to his name, and soon afterwards, rouged, perfumed with amber a la Richelieu, surrounded by negro boys, Italian grey-hounds, and noisy parrots, she died, stretched on a crooked silken couch of the style of Louis the Fifteenth, with an enamelled snuff-box of Petitot’s work in her hands—­and died deserted by her husband.  The insinuating M. Courtin had preferred to take himself and her money off to Paris.