In another passage of the same book,[66] we read an account of his meeting with a woman a hundred years old. As he passed along the street, he noticed her sitting on a bench. He spoke to her, then went on his way. But in the evening, after the day’s work was done, the old woman came back to his mind. He imagined her home-coming and what her family said to her. He describes her death: “I take a delight in inventing the end of the story. Of course I am a novelist and love a tale.” Besides, Dostoevsky never invents by chance. In one of the articles in this same _Journal_, à propos of the Kornilov trial, he reconstitutes and rebuilds the story in his own way, and after the process of the law has thrown light on every aspect of the crime, he writes: “I divined almost everything,” and adds: “Chance enabled me to go and see Madame Kornilova. I was astonished to see that my suppositions were almost identical with the true facts. I had, I admit, made a few errors of detail: for instance, Kornilov, though from the country, wore the townsman’s dress, etc.,” and Dostoevsky concludes: “All in all, my errors have been slight; the basis of my suppositions remains accurate.”[67] With such gifts as an observer, such powers as a narrator and reconstructor of actual events, and an added degree of sensitiveness, you can make a Gogol or a Dickens. Perhaps you remember the beginning of the _Old Curiosity Shop_ where Dickens, too, is busy following up the passers-by, and after he has left them, goes on to imagine their lives? But such gifts, remarkable as they are, do not wholly account for a Balzac, a Thomas Hardy, a Dostoevsky. They would certainly not suffice to make Nietzsche write: “Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn; he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.”[68]