Page 578 - the-idiot

cattle all our lives, and always as hungry as dogs, and there
are others who do not work, and are fat and rich!’ The eter-
nal refrain! And side by side with them trots along some
wretched fellow who has known better days, doing light
porter’s work from morn to night for a living, always blub-
bering and saying that ‘his wife died because he had no
money to buy medicine with,’ and his children dying of
cold and hunger, and his eldest daughter gone to the bad,
and so on. Oh! I have no pity and no patience for these fools
of people. Why can’t they be Rothschilds? Whose fault is it
that a man has not got millions of money like Rothschild?
If he has life, all this must be in his power! Whose fault is it
that he does not know how to live his life?
‘Oh! it’s all the same to me now—NOW! But at that time
I would soak my pillow at night with tears of mortifica-
tion, and tear at my blanket in my rage and fury. Oh, how
I longed at that time to be turned out—ME, eighteen years
old, poor, half-clothed, turned out into the street, quite
alone, without lodging, without work, without a crust of
bread, without relations, without a single acquaintance, in
some large town—hungry, beaten (if you like), but in good
health—and THEN I would show them—
‘What would I show them?
‘Oh, don’t think that I have no sense of my own humilia-
tion! I have suffered already in reading so far. Which of you
all does not think me a fool at this moment—a young fool
who knows nothing of life—forgetting that to live as I have
lived these last six months is to live longer than grey-haired
old men. Well, let them laugh, and say it is all nonsense, if