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all night and keeping him awake. And it is bound to seem
so to him: the intervals of two hours of sleep he does not re-
member, he only remembers the moments of waking, so he
feels he has been waked up all night.
‘But why, why, asks the prosecutor, did not Smerdyakov
confess in his last letter? Why did his conscience prompt
him to one step and not to both? But, excuse me, conscience
implies penitence, and the suicide may not have felt peni-
tence, but only despair. Despair and penitence are two very
different things. Despair may be vindictive and irreconcil-
able, and the suicide, laying his hands on himself, may well
have felt redoubled hatred for those whom he had envied
all his life.
‘Gentlemen of the jury, beware of a miscarriage of jus-
tice! What is there unlikely in all I have put before you just
now? Find the error in my reasoning; find the impossibility,
the absurdity. And if there is but a shade of possibility, but
a shade of probability in my propositions, do not condemn
him. And is there only a shade? I swear by all that is sacred,
I fully believe in the explanation of the murder I have just
put forward. What troubles me and makes me indignant
is that of all the mass of facts heaped up by the prosecu-
tion against the prisoner, there is not a single one certain
and irrefutable. And yet the unhappy man is to be ruined
by the accumulation of these facts. Yes, the accumulated
effect is awful: the blood, the blood dripping from his fin-
gers, the bloodstained shirt, the dark night resounding with
the shout ‘Parricide!’ and the old man falling with a broken
head. And then the mass of phrases, statements, gestures,

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