“And it was very easy to capture me, since I was brought up under artificial conditions, like cucumbers in a hothouse. Our too abundant nourishment¹, together with complete physical idleness, is nothing but systematic² excitement of the imagination. The men of our society are fed and kept like reproductive stallions. It is sufficient to close the valve,— that is, for a young man to live a quiet life for some time,— to produce as an immediate³ result a restlessness, which, becoming exaggerated by reflection through the prism of our unnatural⁴ life, provokes the illusion of love.

“All our idyls and marriage, all, are the result for the most part of our eating. Does that astonish you? For my part, I am astonished that we do not see it. Not far from my estate this spring some moujiks were working on a railway embankment. You know what a peasant’s food is,— bread, kvass,* onions. With this frugal⁵ nourishment he lives, he is alert, he makes light work in the fields. But on the railway this bill of fare becomes cacha and a pound of meat. Only he restores this meat by sixteen hours of labor⁶ pushing loads weighing twelve hundred pounds.

* Kvass, a sort of cider.

“And we, who eat two pounds of meat and game, we who absorb all sorts of heating drinks and food, how do we expend⁷ it? In sensual excesses. If the valve is open, all goes well; but close it, as I had closed it temporarily before my marriage, and immediately there will result an excitement which, deformed⁸ by novels, verses, music, by our idle and luxurious⁹ life, will give a love of the finest water. I, too, fell in love, as everybody does, and there were transports, emotions, poesy; but really all this passion was prepared by mamma and the dressmakers. If there had been no trips in boats, no well-fitted garments, etc., if my wife had worn some shapeless blouse, and I had seen her thus at her home, I should not have been

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