‘Dead Souls’ about him. Do you remember, there’s a landowner called Maximov in it, whom Nozdryov thrashed. He was charged, do you remember, ‘for inflicting bodily injury with rods on the landowner Maximov in a drunken condition.’ Would you believe it, he claims that he was that Maximov and that he was beaten! Now can it be so? Tchitchikov made his journey, at the very latest, at the beginning of the twenties, so that the dates don’t fit. He couldn’t have been thrashed then, he couldn’t could he?”

It was difficult to imagine what Kalganov was excited about, but his excitement was genuine. Mitya followed his lead without protest.

“Well, but if they did thrash him!” he cried, laughing. “It’s not that they thrashed me exactly, but what I mean is…” put in Maximov.

“What do you mean? Either they thrashed you or they didn’t.” “What o’clock is it, panie?” the Pole, with the pipe, asked his tall friend, with a bored expression. The other shrugged his shoulders in reply. Neither of them had a watch.

“Why not talk? Let other people talk. Mustn’t other people talk because you’re bored?” Grushenka flew at him with evident intention of finding fault. Something seemed for the first time to flash upon Mitya’s mind. This time the Pole answered with unmistakable irritability.

“pani, I didn’t oppose it. I didn’t say anything.” “All right then. Come, tell us your story,” Grushenka cried to Maximov. “Why are you all silent?”

“There’s nothing to tell, it’s all so foolish,” answered Maximov at once, with evident satisfaction, mincing a little. “Besides, all that’s by way of allegory in Gogol, for he’s made all the names have a meaning. Nozdryov was really called Nosov, and Kuvshinikov had quite a different name, he was called Shkvornev. Fenardi really was called Fenardi, only he wasn’t an Italian but a Russian, and Mamsel Fenardi was a pretty girl with her pretty little legs in tights, and she had a little short skirt with spangles, and she kept turning round and round, only not for four hours but for four minutes only, and she bewitched every one…”

“But what were you beaten for?” cried Kalganov.

“For Piron!” answered Maximov.

“What Piron?” cried Mitya.

“The famous French writer, Piron. We were all drinking then, a big party of us, in a tavern at that very fair. They’d invited me, and first of all I began quoting epigrams. ‘Is that you, Boileau? What a funny get-up!’ and Boileau answers that he’s going to a masquerade, that is to the baths, he-he! And they took it to themselves, so I made haste to repeat another, very sarcastic, well known to all educated people:

They were still more offended and began abusing me in the most unseemly way for it. And as ill-luck would have it, to set things right, I began telling a very cultivated anecdote about Piron, how he was not accepted into the French Academy, and to revenge himself wrote his own epitaph:

They seized me and thrashed me.”

“But what for? What for?”

‘For my education. People can thrash a man for anything,” Maximov concluded, briefly and sententiously.