Page 568 - the-idiot

ment me like that, I cannot tell—but you it was.’
There was absolute hatred in his eyes as he said this, but
his look of fear and his trembling had not left him.
‘You shall hear all this directly, gentlemen. I-I—listen!’
He seized his paper in a desperate hurry; he fidgeted
with it, and tried to sort it, but for a long while his trembling
hands could not collect the sheets together. ‘He’s either mad
or delirious,’ murmured Rogojin. At last he began.
For the first five minutes the reader’s voice continued
to tremble, and he read disconnectedly and unevenly; but
gradually his voice strengthened. Occasionally a violent fit
of coughing stopped him, but his animation grew with the
progress of the reading—as did also the disagreeable im-
pression which it made upon his audience,—until it reached
the highest pitch of excitement.
Here is the article.
MY NECESSARY EXPLANATION.
‘Apres moi le deluge.
‘Yesterday morning the prince came to see me. Among
other things he asked me to come down to his villa. I knew
he would come and persuade me to this step, and that he
would adduce the argument that it would be easier for me to
die’ among people and green trees,’—as he expressed it. But
today he did not say ‘die,’ he said ‘live.’ It is pretty much the
same to me, in my position, which he says. When I asked
him why he made such a point of his ‘green trees,’ he told
me, to my astonishment, that he had heard that last time
I was in Pavlofsk I had said that I had come ‘to have a last
look at the trees.’