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By Root 622 0

cooks of yours living on charity—they went blind in your kitchens from the heat of the stoves. All the health, strength, and beauty that pours from your tens of thousands of acres is given over by you and your parasites to your grooms and footmen and coachmen. All these two-legged animals are brought up to become flunkies, stuffers of food, vulgarians, men who have departed from ‘the image and likeness of God.’… They might have been young doctors, agricultural experts, teachers, intellectuals, but, God in heaven, you tear them away from honest work, and for the sake of a crust of bread you make them play in your puppet shows, and that’s enough to make any decent man ashamed. Men like that can’t remain in your service for three years without becoming hypocrites, slanderers, and flatterers.… Is that good? Your Polish overseers, those scoundrels and spies, with names like Kasimir and Gaëtan, prowl from morning to night over your tens of thousands of acres and to please you they try to skin every ox three times over! Excuse me if I speak at random, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t regard the simple folk on your estates as though they were living people. And even the princes, counts, and bishops who used to visit you—you never regarded them as anything more than decoration. They were not living people. But the most important thing—the one that revolts me most of all—is that you possessed a fortune of more than a million rubles, and you did nothing for the people—nothing at all!”

The Princess sat there with a look of amazement, shock, and fear. She did not know what to say or how to behave. No one had ever spoken to her in that tone of voice. The doctor’s unpleasantly angry voice, his fumbling and stuttering, came like a harsh grating sound on her ears and on her brain: until she felt that the gesticulating doctor was beating her around the head with his hat.

“It’s not true at all,” she answered softly in an imploring voice. “I’ve done a lot of good things for people, and you know it!”

“Stuff and nonsense!” the doctor shouted at her. “Can you possibly maintain that your philanthropic works were undertaken for a serious purpose—weren’t they just puppets being pulled on strings! They were nothing more than a farce from beginning to end! You were playing a game of loving your neighbor—such an obvious game that even children and stupid peasant women understood what you were doing! Take your—what do you call it?—rest home for homeless old women, of which I was appointed a kind of head doctor, and in which you played the role of honorary patroness. God have mercy on us, what a wonderful institution that was! You built a house with parquet flooring, and there was a weather vane on the roof, and a dozen old women were rounded up from the villages and made to sleep under blankets of some woolen stuff and sheets of Dutch linen, and given candy to eat!”

The doctor laughed maliciously into his hat, and went on speaking rapidly, stammering out the words.

“What a game, eh? The lower-ranking officials in the rest home kept the sheets and blankets locked up, because they were afraid the old women would spoil them—’ Let the devil’s pepper-pots sleep on the floor!’ The old women didn’t dare sit on the beds, or put on their jackets, or walk on the smooth parquet floors. Everything was arranged for display purposes only, and everything was hidden away from the old women as though they were thieves; and so they had to be clothed and fed on the sly by charitable persons. Day and night these old women prayed God to deliver them from their prison as soon as possible, and they prayed to be delivered from the edifying discourses of the fat swine into whose care they had been entrusted by you. And what did the higher-ranking officials do? It was perfectly charming! Twice a week, during the evening, there would descend upon us about thirty-five thousand messengers announcing that the Princess—you—would pay us a visit on the following day. That meant that on the next day I had to abandon my patients, dress up, and go on parade! Very well! I arrive. The