Page 185 - the-idiot

go; I have business with her; I was not invited but I was
introduced. Anyhow I am ready to trespass the laws of pro-
priety if only I can get in somehow or other.’
‘My dear young friend, you have hit on my very idea. It
was not for this rubbish I asked you to come over here’ (he
pocketed the money, however, at this point), ‘it was to invite
your alliance in the campaign against Nastasia Philipovna
tonight. How well it sounds, ‘General Ivolgin and Prince
Muishkin.’ That’ll fetch her, I think, eh? Capital! We’ll go at
nine; there’s time yet.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Oh, a long way off, near the Great Theatre, just in the
square there—It won’t be a large party.’
The general sat on and on. He had ordered a fresh bottle
when the prince arrived; this took him an hour to drink,
and then he had another, and another, during the con-
sumption of which he told pretty nearly the whole story of
his life. The prince was in despair. He felt that though he
had but applied to this miserable old drunkard because he
saw no other way of getting to Nastasia Philipovna’s, yet he
had been very wrong to put the slightest confidence in such
a man.
At last he rose and declared that he would wait no lon-
ger. The general rose too, drank the last drops that he could
squeeze out of the bottle, and staggered into the street.
Muishkin began to despair. He could not imagine how
he had been so foolish as to trust this man. He only want-
ed one thing, and that was to get to Nastasia Philipovna’s,
even at the cost of a certain amount of impropriety. But

1 The Idiot