I did not speak. He, too, was silent for a long time. "They say that French cleverness..." he babbled suddenly, as though in a fever... "that's false, it always has been. Why libel French cleverness? It's simply Russian indolence, our degrading impotence to produce ideas, our revolting parasitism in the rank of nations. _Ils sont tout simplement des paresseux,_ and not French cleverness. Oh, the Russians ought to be extirpated for the good of humanity, like noxious parasites! We've been striving for something utterly, utterly different. I can make nothing of it. I have given up understanding. 'Do you understand,' I cried to him, 'that if you have the guillotine in the foreground of your programme and are so enthusiastic about it too, it's simply because nothing's easier than cutting off heads, and nothing's harder than to have an idea. _Vous êtes des paresseux! Votre drapeau est un guenille, une impuissance._ It's those carts, or, what was it?... the rumble of the carts carrying bread to humanity being more important than the Sistine Madonna, or, what's the saying?... _une bêtise dans ce genre._ Don't you understand, don't you understand,' I said to him, 'that unhappiness is just as necessary to man as happiness.' _Il rit._ 'All you do is to make a _bon mot,_' he said, 'with your limbs snug on a velvet sofa.'... (He used a coarser expression.) And this habit of addressing a father so familiarly is very nice when father and son are on good terms, but what do you think of it when they are abusing one another?" We were silent again for a minute. _"Cher,"_ he concluded at last, getting up quickly, "do you know this is bound to end in something?" "Of course," said I. "_Vous ne comprenez pas. Passons._ But... usually in our world things come to nothing, but this will end in something; it's bound to, it's bound to!" He got up, and walked across the room in violent emotion, and coming back to the sofa sank on to it exhausted. On Friday morning, Pyotr Stepanovitch went off somewhere in the neighbourhood, and remained away till Monday. I heard of his departure from Liputin, and in the course of conversation I learned that the Lebyadkins, brother and sister, had moved to the riverside quarter. "I moved them," he added, and, dropping the Lebyadkins, he suddenly announced to me that Lizaveta Nikolaevna was going to marry Mavriky Nikolaevitch, that, although it had not been announced, the engagement was a settled thing. Next day I met Lizaveta Nikolaevna out riding with Mavriky Nikolaevitch; she was out for the first time after her illness. She beamed at me from the distance, laughed, and nodded in a very friendly way. I told all this to Stepan Trofimovitch; he paid no attention, except to the news about the Lebyadkins.