“So we lived in the city. In the city the wretched feel less sad. One can live there a hundred years without being noticed, and be dead a long time before anybody will notice it. People have no time to inquire into your life. All are absorbed. Business, social relations, art, the health of children, their education. And there are visits that must be received and made; it is necessary to see this one, it is necessary to hear that one or the other one. In the city there are always one, two, or three celebrities¹ that it is indispensable that one should visit.

Now one must care for himself, or care for such or such a little one, now it is the professor, the private tutor, the governesses, . . . and life is absolutely empty. In this activity we were less conscious of the sufferings of our cohabitation. Moreover, in the first of it, we had a superb occupation,— the arrangement of the new dwelling², and then, too, the moving from the city to the country, and from the country to the city.

“Thus we spent a winter. The following winter an incident happened to us which passed unnoticed, but which was the fundamental cause of all that happened later. My wife was suffering, and the rascals³ (the doctors) would not permit her to conceive a child, and taught her how to avoid it. I was profoundly disgusted. I struggled vainly against it, but she insisted frivolously⁴ and obstinately⁵, and I surrendered. The last justification⁶ of our life as wretches⁷ was thereby⁸ suppressed, and life became baser than ever.

“The peasant and the workingman need children, and hence their conjugal⁹ relations have a justification. But we, when we have a few children, have no need of any more. They make a

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