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such foresight at such a moment may strike you as unnat-
ural? But he assures us himself that a month before, at a
critical and exciting moment, he had halved his money and
sewn it up in a little bag. And though that was not true, as
we shall prove directly, it shows the idea was a familiar one
to Karamazov, he had contemplated it. What’s more, when
he declared at the inquiry that he had put fifteen hundred
roubles in a bag (which never existed) he may have invented
that little bag on the inspiration of the moment, because he
had two hours before divided his money and hidden half of
it at Mokroe till morning, in case of emergency, simply not
to have it on himself. Two extremes, gentlemen of the jury,
remember that Karamazov can contemplate two extremes
and both at once.
‘We have looked in the house, but we haven’t found the
money. It may still be there or it may have disappeared next
day and be in the prisoner’s hands now. In any case he was
at her side, on his knees before her, she was lying on the bed,
he had his hands stretched out to her and he had so entire-
ly forgotten everything that he did not even hear the men
coming to arrest him. He hadn’t time to prepare any line
of defence in his mind. He was caught unawares and con-
fronted with his judges, the arbiters of his destiny.
‘Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments in the execu-
tion of our duties when it is terrible for us to face a man,
terrible on his account, too! The moments of contemplating
that animal fear, when the criminal sees that all is lost, but
still struggles, still means to struggle, the moments when
every instinct of self-preservation rises up in him at once