University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.

"AND it was very easy to capture me, since
I was brought up under artificial conditions, like
cucumbers in a hothouse. Our too abundant
nourishment, together with complete physical
idleness, is nothing but systematic 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 pro-
duce as an immediate result a restlessness,
which, becoming exaggerated by reflection
through the prism of our unnatural life, pro-
vokes 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 peas-
ant's food is,—bread,
kvass,* onions. With this

frugal nourishment he lives, he is alert, he
makes light work in the fields. But on the rail-
way this bill of fare becomes
cacha
and a pound
of meat. Only he restores this meat by sixteen
hours of labor pushing loads weighing twelve
hundred pounds.

"And we, who eat two pounds of meat and
game, we who absorb all sorts of heating drinks
and food, how do we expend it? In sensual ex-
cesses. 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, deformed by novels, verses,
music, by our idle and luxurious life, will give a
love of the finest water. I, too, fell in love, as
everybody does, and there were transports, emo-
tions, poesy; but really all this passion was pre-
pared by mamma and the dressmakers. If there
had been no trips in boats, no well-fitted gar-
ments, etc., if my wife had worn some shapeless
blouse, and I had seen her thus at her home,

I should not have been seduced.