She liked being driven with fast-trotting horses, and was ready to play cards from morning till evening, and would always keep the score of the pennies she had lost or won hidden under her hand when her husband came near the card-table; but all her dowry, her whole fortune, she had put absolutely at his disposal.  She bore him two children, a son Ivan, the father of Fedor, and a daughter Glafira.  Ivan was not brought up at home, but lived with a rich old maiden aunt, the Princess Kubensky; she had fixed on him for her heir (but for that his father would not have let him go).  She dressed him up like a doll, engaged all kinds of teachers for him, and put him in charge of a tutor, a Frenchman, who had been an abbe, a pupil of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a certain M. Courtin de Vaucelles, a subtle and wily intriguer—­the very, as she expressed it, fine fleur of emigration—­and finished at almost seventy years old by marrying this “fine fleur,” and making over all her property to him.  Soon afterwards, covered with rouge, and redolent of perfume a la Richelieu, surrounded by negro boys, delicate-shaped greyhounds and shrieking parrots, she died on a crooked silken divan of the time of Louis XV., with an enamelled snuff-box of Petitot’s workmanship in her hand—­and died, deserted by her husband; the insinuating M. Courtin had preferred to remove to Paris with her money.  Ivan had only reached his twentieth year when this unexpected blow (we mean the princess’s marriage, not her death) fell upon him; he did not care to stay in his aunt’s house, where he found himself suddenly transformed from a wealthy heir to a poor relation; the society in Petersburg in which he had grown up was closed to him; he felt an aversion for entering the government service in the lower grades, with nothing but hard work and obscurity before him,—­this was at the very beginning of the reign of the Emperor Alexander.  He was obliged reluctantly to return to the country to his father.  How squalid, poor, and wretched his parents’ home seemed to him!  The stagnation and sordidness of life in the country offended him at every step.  He was consumed with ennui.  Moreover, every one in the house, except his mother, looked at him with unfriendly eyes.  His father did not like his town manners, his swallow-tail coats, his frilled shirt-fronts, his books, his flute, his fastidious ways, in which he detected—­not incorrectly—­a disgust for his surroundings; he was for ever complaining and grumbling at his son.  “Nothing here,” he used to say, “is to his taste; at table he is all in a fret, and doesn’t eat; he can’t bear the heat and close smell of the room; the sight of folks drunk upsets him, one daren’t beat any one before him; he doesn’t want to go into the government service; he’s weakly, as you see, in health; fie upon him, the milksop!  And all this because he’s got his head full of Voltaire.”  The old man had a special dislike to Voltaire, and the “fanatic” Diderot, though he had not read a word of their words;