1 0 The Brothers Karamazov
childhood. He cursed and jeered at Russia. He dreamed of
going to France and becoming a Frenchman. He used often
to say that he hadn’t the means to do so. I fancy he loved no
one but himself and had a strangely high opinion of himself.
His conception of culture was limited to good clothes, clean
shirt-fronts and polished boots. Believing himself to be the
illegitimate son of Fyodor Pavlovitch (there is evidence of
this), he might well have resented his position, compared
with that of his master’s legitimate sons. They had every-
thing, he nothing. They had all the rights, they had the
inheritance, while he was only the cook. He told me himself
that he had helped Fyodor Pavlovitch to put the notes in
the envelope. The destination of that sum — a sum which
would have made his career- must have been hateful to him.
Moreover, he saw three thousand roubles in new rainbow-
coloured notes. (I asked him about that on purpose.) Oh,
beware of showing an ambitious and envious man a large
sum of money at once! And it was the first time he had seen
so much money in the hands of one man. The sight of the
rainbow-coloured notes may have made a morbid impres-
sion on his imagination, but with no immediate results.
‘The talented prosecutor, with extraordinary subtlety,
sketched for us all the arguments for and against the hy-
pothesis of Smerdyakov’s guilt, and asked us in particular
what motive he had in feigning a fit. But he may not have
been feigning at all, the fit may have happened quite natu-
rally, but it may have passed off quite naturally, and the sick
man may have recovered, not completely perhaps, but still
regaining consciousness, as happens with epileptics.