At this moment there was evident in his words a genuine, deep despair:  he did not look at me, but sat motionless.

“Why are you in such despair?” I asked.

“Because I am abominable.  This life has degraded me, all that was in me, all is crushed out.  It is not by pride that I hold out, but by abjectness:  there’s no dignite dans le malheur.  I am humiliated every moment; I endure it all; I got myself into this abasement.  This mire has soiled me.  I myself have become coarse; I have forgotten what I used to know; I can’t speak French any more; I am conscious that I am base and low.  I cannot tear myself away from these surroundings, indeed I cannot.  I might have been a hero:  give me a regiment, gold epaulets, a trumpeter, but to march in the ranks with some wild Anton Bondarenko or the like, and feel that between me and him there was no difference at all—­that he might be killed or I might be killed—­all the same, that thought is maddening.  You understand how horrible it is to think that some ragamuffin may kill me, a man who has thoughts and feelings, and that it would make no difference if alongside of me some Antonof were killed,—­a being not different from an animal—­and that it might easily happen that I and not this Antonof were killed, which is always une FATALITE for every lofty and good man.  I know that they call me a coward:  grant that I am a coward, I certainly am a coward, and can’t be anything else.  Not only am I a coward, but I am in my way a low and despicable man.  Here I have just been borrowing money of you, and you have the right to despise me.  No, take back your money.”  And he held out to me the crumpled bank-bill.  “I want you to have a good opinion of me.”  He covered his face with his hands, and burst into tears.  I really did not know what to say or do.

“Calm yourself,” I said to him.  “You are too sensitive; don’t take everything so to heart; don’t indulge in self-analysis, look at things more simply.  You yourself say that you have character.  Keep up good heart, you won’t have long to wait,” I said to him, but not very consistently, because I was much stirred both by a feeling of sympathy and a feeling of repentance, because I had allowed myself mentally to sin in my judgment of a man truly and deeply unhappy.

“Yes,” he began, “if I had heard even once, at the time when I was in that hell, one single word of sympathy, of advice, of friendship—­one humane word such as you have just spoken, perhaps I might have calmly endured all; perhaps I might have struggled, and been a soldier.  But now this is horrible. . . .  When I think soberly, I long for death.  Why should I love my despicable life and my own self, now that I am ruined for all that is worth while in the world?  And at the least danger, I suddenly, in spite of myself, begin to pray for my miserable life, and to watch over it as though it were precious, and I cannot, je ne puis pas, control