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better than your head.’
‘My heart better than my head, is it? Oh Lord! And that
from you. Ivan, do you love Alyosha?’
‘You must love him’ (Fyodor Pavlovitch was by this time
very drunk). ‘Listen, Alyosha, I was rude to your elder this
morning. But I was excited. But there’s wit in that elder,
don’t you think, Ivan?’
‘Very likely.’
‘There is, there is. Il y a du Piron la-dedans.* He’s a Jesuit,
a Russian one, that is. As he’s an honourable person there’s
a hidden indignation boiling within him at having to pre-
tend and affect holiness.’
- There’s something of Piron inside of him.
‘But, of course, he believes in God.’
‘Not a bit of it. Didn’t you know? Why, he tells everyone
so, himself. That is, not everyone, but all the clever people
who come to him. He said straight out to Governor Schultz
not long ago: ‘Credo, but I don’t know in what.’’
‘Really?’
‘He really did. But I respect him. There’s something of
Mephistopheles about him, or rather of ‘The hero of our
time’... Arbenin, or what’s his name?... You see, he’s a sen-
sualist. He’s such a sensualist that I should be afraid for
my daughter or my wife if she went to confess to him. You
know, when he begins telling stories... The year before last
he invited us to tea, tea with liqueur (the ladies send him
liqueur), and began telling us about old times till we nearly
split our sides.... Especially how he once cured a paralysed
woman. ‘If my legs were not bad I know a dance I could