Although the shopman went into ecstasies over his cleverness, both to his face and behind his back, there were times when, like me, he wanted to provoke or offend the old man. "You are a deceiver of men," he would say, suddenly looking heatedly into the old man's face. The latter, smiling lazily, answered: "Only the Lord lives without deceit, and we live among fools, you see. Can one meet fools, and not deceive them? Of what use would they be, then?" The shopman lost his temper. "Not all the peasants are fools. The merchants themselves came from the peasantry!" "We are not talking about merchants. Fools do not live as rogues do. A fool is like a saint--his brains are asleep." The old man drawled more and more lazily, and this was very irritating. It seemed to me that he was standing on a hillock in the midst of a quagmire. It was impossible to make him angry. Either he was above rage, or he was able to hide it very successfully. But he often happened to be the one to start a dispute with me. He would come quite close to me, and smiling into his beard, remark: "What do you call that French writer--Ponoss?" I was desperately angry at this silly way of turning the names upside down. But holding myself in for the time, I said: "Ponson de Terrail." "Where was he lost?"[1] "Don't play the fool. You are not a child." "That is true. I am not a child. What are you reading?" "'Ephrem Siren.'" "And who writes best. Your foreign authors? or he?" I made no reply. "What do the foreign ones write about most?" "About everything which happens to exist in life." [Footnote 1: Terryat in Russian means "to lose."] "That is to say, about dogs and horses--whichever may happen to come their way." The shopman laughed. I was enraged. The atmosphere was oppressive, unpleasant to me. But if I attempted to get away, the shopman stopped me. "Where are you going?" And the old man would examine me. "Now, you learned man, gnaw this problem. Suppose you had a thousand naked people standing before you, five hundred women and five hundred men, and among them Adam and Eve. How would you tell which were Adam and Eve?" He kept asking me this, and at length explained triumphantly: "Little fool, don't you see that, as they were not born, but were created, they would have no navels!" The old man knew an innumerable quantity of these "problems." He could wear me out with them. During my early days at the shop, I used to tell the shopman the contents of some of the books I had read. Now these stories came back to me in an evil form. The shopman retold them to Petr Vassilich, considerably cut up, obscenely mutilated. The old man skilfully helped him in his shameful questions. Their slimy tongues threw the refuse of their obscene words at Eugénie Grandet, Ludmilla, and Henry IV. I understood that they did not do this out of ill-nature, but simply because they wanted something to do. All the same, I did not find it easy to bear.