Page 1210 - the-brothers-karamazov

Chapter 9

The Galloping

Troika. The End of the

Prosecutor’s Speech

PPOLIT KIRILLOVITCH had chosen the historial meth-
Iod of exposition, beloved by all nervous orators, who find
in its limitation a check on their own eager rhetoric. At this
moment in his speech he went off into a dissertation on
Grushenka’s ‘first lover,’ and brought forward several inter-
esting thoughts on this theme.
‘Karamazov, who had been frantically jealous of every-
one, collapsed, so to speak, and effaced himself at once
before this first lover. What makes it all the more strange
is that he seems to have hardly thought of this formidable
rival. But he had looked upon him as a remote danger, and
Karamazov always lives in the present. Possibly he regarded
him as a fiction. But his wounded heart grasped instantly
that the woman had been concealing this new rival and de-
ceiving him, because he was anything but a fiction to her,
because he was the one hope of her life. Grasping this in-

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