“I vented my anger on any one I could find. About that time, altogether for no definite reason, I took it into my head to cripple my life, but only in as disgusting a way as possible. Already for about a year I had been thinking of shooting myself; but something better presented itself. “One day, as I looked at the lame Marya Timofeevna Lebiadkin, the woman who in a sense tidied up the rooms, and at that time was not yet mad, but simply an exalted idiot, in secret madly in love with me (which my friends had discovered), I suddenly determined to marry her. The idea of the marriage of Stavrogin with that lowest of creatures excited my nerves. Anything more monstrous it was impossible to imagine.[46] At any rate I married her, not simply because of ‘a bet made after dinner in one’s cups.’ The witnesses were Kirillov and Peter Verkhovensky, who happened to be in Petersburg; and lastly, Lebiadkin himself and Prokhor Malov (who is now dead). No one else ever knew of it, and those who did swore to keep silence. That silence always seemed to me a kind of meanness, but it has not been broken up till now, although I intended to make it public; now I make it public as well as the rest. Footnote 46: After the word “imagine” is struck out: “I will not decide one way or another whether into my resolution there entered even unconsciously (of course, unconsciously) anger for the wild cowardice which had possessed me after the affair with Matryosha. Really, I do not think so.” “The wedding over, I went to the country to stay with my mother. I went to distract myself.[47] In our town I had left behind me the idea that I was mad—which idea still persists even now and undoubtedly does me harm, as I shall explain later. After that I went abroad and remained there four years. “I was in the East in the monastery on Mount Athos and attended religious services which lasted eight hours; I was in Egypt, lived in Switzerland, travelled even in Iceland; spent a whole year at Göttingen University. During the last year I became very friendly with a distinguished Russian family in Paris, and with two Russian girls in Switzerland. About two years ago, in Frankfort, passing a stationer’s shop, I noticed amongst the photographs for sale a portrait of a little girl, dressed in an elegant childish dress, but very much like Matryosha. Footnote 47: After “distract” is struck out: “and because it had become intolerable.” I bought the portrait at once, and when I returned to my hotel I put it on the mantelpiece of my room. There it lay for a week untouched, and I did not once look at it; and when I left Frankfort I forgot to take it with me.