The Gambler and Other Stories (Penguin ed.)

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  ‘Yes, the whole town; but I don’t think the general is giving that any thought – he has other things on his mind. And what’s more, Miss Polina is entitled to live where she pleases. As for that family, it can truly be said that the family no longer exists.’

  I walked away and chuckled at this Englishman’s strange certainty that I was going to Paris. ‘However, he wants to kill me in a duel,’ I thought, ‘if Mlle Polina dies – yet more bother!’ I swear that I felt sorry for Polina, but strangely enough, from the moment I touched the gaming table yesterday and started raking in packets of money – my love seemed to have retreated into the background. That’s how I would put it now, but then I still hadn’t clearly seen all this. Is it possible that I really am a gambler? Is it possible that I really … loved Polina so strangely? No, I love her to this day, as God is my witness! And then, when I had left Mr Astley and was going home, I was sincere in suffering and blaming myself. But … but then an utterly strange and silly thing happened to me.

  I was hurrying to the general’s, when suddenly a door not far from his suite opened and someone called out to me. It was Madame veuve Cominges and she was calling me at the request of Mlle Blanche.

  They had a small suite, just two rooms. I could hear Mlle Blanche laughing and calling from the bedroom. She was just getting up.

  ‘Ah, c’est lui! Viens donc, bêtà. Is it true, que tu as gagné une montagne d’or et d’argent? J’aimerais mieux l’or.’3

  ‘I did,’ I answered, laughing.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A hundred thousand florins.’

  ‘Bibi, comme tu es bête. Yes, come in here, I can’t hear anything. Nous ferons bombance, n’est-ce pas?’4

  I went in to her. She was lolling under a pink satin blanket, from beneath which her dusky, strong, marvellous shoulders were on display – shoulders the likes of which one only sees in a dream – carelessly covered by a cambric camisole, trimmed with the whitest lace, which suited her dusky skin to a remarkable degree.

  ‘Mons fils, as-tu du coeur?’ she exclaimed upon seeing me, and burst out laughing. She always laughed very gaily and even sometimes sincerely.

  ‘Tout autre …’5 I began, paraphrasing Corneille.

  ‘There, you see, vois-tu,’ she suddenly began chattering, ‘first of all, find my stockings, help me get them on, and in the second place, si tu n’es pas trop bête, je te prends à Paris.6 You see, I’m going now.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘In half an hour.’

  Indeed, everything was packed. All her cases and things were ready. Coffee had been served long before.

  ‘Eh bien! Do you want, tu verras Paris. Dis donc qu’est ce que c’est qu’un outchitel? Tu étais bien bête, quand tu étais outchitel.7 Where are my stockings? Well, help me get them on!’

  She held out her truly delightful little foot, dusky, tiny, not misshapen like most feet that look so charming in shoes. I laughed and began to pull on her silk stocking. Mlle Blanche meanwhile sat on the bed and chattered away.

  ‘Eh bien, que feras-tu, si je te prends avec? First of all, je veux cinquante mille francs. You can give them to me in Frankfurt. Nous allons à Paris; we will live together there et je te ferai voir des étoiles en plein jour.8 You will see such women, the like of which you have never seen. Listen …’

  ‘Wait a minute, if I give you 50,000 francs, then what will be left for me?’

  ‘Et cent cinquante mille francs, you’ve forgotten, and besides I agree to live with you in your apartment for a month or two, que sais-je! We, of course, will go through those 150,000 francs in two months. You see, je suis bonne enfant and I tell you beforehand, mais tu verras des étoiles.’9

  ‘What, all of it in two months?’

  ‘What! Does that horrify you! Ah, vil esclave! But do you know that one month of life like that is better than your whole existence. One month – et après le deluge! Mais tu ne peux comprendre, va! Off you go, off you go! You’re not worthy! Oh, que fais-tu?’10

  At that moment I was putting the stocking on her other foot, but I couldn’t help myself and I kissed it. She pulled it away and began to hit me in the face with the tip of her toes. In the end, she chased me out altogether.

  ‘Eh bien, mon outchitel, je t’attends, si tu veux;11 I’m leaving in a quarter of an hour!’ she called out after me.

  Upon returning home, my head was already spinning. Now then, I was not to blame that Mlle Polina had thrown an entire packet in my face and as of yesterday preferred Mr Astley over me. Some of the banknotes that had been scattered about still lay on the floor; I picked them up. At that minute the door opened and the manager himself (who hadn’t even wanted to look at me before) appeared with an invitation: Wouldn’t I like to move downstairs into the magnificent rooms just vacated by Count V?

  I stood there for a moment, thinking.

  ‘My bill! I’m leaving now, in ten minutes,’ I cried. ‘If it’s to be Paris, then Paris it is!’ I thought to myself. ‘Evidently, it was meant to be!’

  A quarter of an hour later the three of us were indeed sitting in a family carriage: Mlle Blanche et Madame veuve Cominges and myself. Mlle Blanche laughed loudly, almost to the point of hysterics, as she looked at me. Veuve Cominges seconded her; I can’t say that I was very cheerful. My life had been broken in two, but since yesterday I had already grown accustomed to betting everything I had on a single card. Perhaps it was indeed true that I was unable to take the money in stride and had lost my head. Peut-être, je ne demandais pas mieux.12 It seemed that for a time – but only for a time – the scenery was being changed. ‘But in a month I’ll be here again and then … and then we’ll be rivals once again, Mr Astley!’ No, as I now recall, I was terribly sad even then, though I was laughing as loudly as that little fool Blanche.

  ‘But what’s the matter with you? How silly you are! Oh, how silly you are,’ Blanche exclaimed, interrupting her laughter and beginning seriously to take me to task. ‘Well, yes, well, yes, yes, we’ll go through all of your 200,000 francs, but in return, mais tu seras heureux, comme un petit roi; I’ll tie your necktie for you myself and introduce you to Hortense. And when we’ve gone through all your money, you’ll come back here and break the bank again. What did those Jews say to you? The main thing is courage, and you have it, and you’ll bring money to me in Paris more than once. Quant à moi, je veux cinquante mille francs de rente et alors …’13

  ‘And what about the general?’ I asked her.

  ‘The general, as you know, every day at this hour goes to get me a bouquet. This time I deliberately requested that he find me some very rare flowers. The poor thing will return, and the little bird will have flown away. He’ll come flying after us, you’ll see. Ha-ha-ha! I’ll be very glad. He’ll be of use to me in Paris; Mr Astley will pay for his stay here …’

  And that was how I came to set out for Paris then.

  CHAPTER 16

  What can I say about Paris? Of course, it was all delirium and folly. I spent just over three weeks in Paris, and in that time my hundred thousand francs were completely finished. I’m speaking only of the hundred thousand; the remaining hundred thousand I’d given Mlle Blanche in cash – fifty thousand in Frankfurt and three days later in Paris I gave her a promissory note for another 50,000 francs, which, however, she redeemed for cash from me a week later, ‘et les cent mille francs, qui nous restent, tu les mangeras avec moi,1 mon outchitel’. She always called me tutor. It’s difficult to imagine anything on this earth more conniving, mean and stingy than the class of creatures like Mlle Blanche. But that’s only where spending her own money was concerned. As for my hundred thousand francs – she frankly announced to me later that she needed them for the initial costs of setting herself up in Paris. ‘So that now I have begun in grand style once and for all, and nobody will knock me down for a long time – at least that’s how I’ve arranged things,’ she added. However, I hardly saw that hundred thousand; she kept the money the whole time, while my note-case, the conte
nts of which she would apprise herself every day, never held more than a hundred francs, and almost always less than that.

  ‘But what do you need money for?’ she would say at times with the most guileless demeanour, and I didn’t argue with her. But on the other hand, she put the finishing touches to her apartment very, very nicely with that money, and when she later took me to her new home and showed me the rooms, she said: ‘You see what can be done with care and taste on the most paltry sums.’ The price of this paltriness, however, was exactly 50,000 francs. She acquired horses and a carriage with the remaining 50,000; moreover, we gave two balls, that is, two evening parties, which were attended by Hortense and Lisette and Cléopâtre – women remarkable in many, many respects and not at all bad looking. I was made to play the very foolish part of host at those two parties, to greet and entertain some nouveau riche and utterly dimwitted merchants, assorted, impossibly ignorant and shameless army lieutenants and pathetic little authors and journalistic vermin, who made their appearance in fashionable tailcoats, pale yellow gloves and with a sense of self-esteem and an arrogance of such proportions inconceivable even in Petersburg – and that’s saying a great deal. They even took it into their heads to laugh at me, but I got drunk on the champagne and lay sprawled out in the back room. I found all this to be loath-some in the highest degree. ‘C’est un outchitel,’ Blanche would say about me, ‘il a gagné deux cent mille francs2 and without me he wouldn’t know how to spend them. And afterwards he’ll enter the ranks of tutors again; does anybody know of a position? Something must be done for him.’ I began turning to champagne quite often, because I was invariably very sad and extremely bored. I lived in the most bourgeois, the most mercantile milieu, where every sou was counted and rationed out. Blanche didn’t like me at all for the first two weeks, I noticed. True, she dressed me like a dandy and daily tied my necktie for me herself, but in her heart she frankly despised me. I didn’t pay this the slightest attention. Bored and despondent, I started going to the Château des Fleurs, where I regularly got drunk every night and learned the cancan (which they dance vilely there) and even acquired some notoriety for this later on. Finally, Blanche figured me out: she had somehow earlier got the impression that during the entire period of our cohabitation I would walk behind her with pencil and paper in hand and would add up how much she had spent, how much she had stolen, how much she was going to spend and how much more she would steal. And, of course, she was sure that we would have rows over every ten francs. To my every assault, which she had pictured to herself beforehand, she had prepared her justification well in advance; but seeing that no assaults were forthcoming from me, she at first would launch into the justifications anyway. sometimes she would begin ever so heatedly, but when she saw that I remained silent – more often than not I was lolling about on the couch and staring intently at the ceiling – she would end up being surprised. At first she thought that I was simply a fool, ‘un outchitel’, and would simply break off her explanations, probably thinking to herself: ‘After all, he’s a fool; there’s no reason to keep on about it if he doesn’t understand.’ She would leave, but sometimes ten minutes later would come back again – this happened during the period of her most frenzied spending, when she was spending completely beyond our means: for example, she changed her horses and bought a pair for 16,000 francs.

  ‘Well, so, bibi, you’re not angry?’ she came up to me.

  ‘No-o-o! I’m sick to death of you!’ I said, waving her away with my hand, but she found this so curious that she immediately sat down beside me.

  ‘You see, if I decided to pay so much it was only because they were such a bargain. They can be resold for 20,000 francs.’

  ‘I believe you, I believe you; the horses are handsome; and now you have a splendid turnout; they’ll come in handy; well and that’s enough of that.’

  ‘So you’re not angry?’

  ‘Why should I be? You’re acting sensibly by providing yourself with some essential things. All this will come in handy later on. I see that you really need to put yourself on a footing like this; otherwise, you won’t make your million. Our hundred thousand francs is only the beginning, a drop in the ocean.’

  For Blanche, who had expected from me anything but reasoning like this (instead of shouts and incriminations!), this came like a bolt from the blue.

  ‘So you … so that’s what you’re like! Mais tu as de l’esprit pour comprendre! Sais-tu, mon garçon,3 even though you’re a tutor – but you should have been born a prince! So you don’t regret that the money is going so quickly?’

  ‘Well, so what – the quicker the better!’

  ‘Mais … sais-tu … mais dis donc, are you rich? Mais sais-tu, you see, you despise money too much. Qu’est ce que tu feras après, dis donc?’4

  ‘Après I’ll go to Homburg5 and win another hundred thousand francs.’

  ‘Oui, oui, c’est ça, c’est magnifique! And I know that you will win without fail and bring it here. Dis donc, and you’ll make me really love you! Eh bien, for being like this I will love you the whole time and won’t be unfaithful to you even once. You see, even though I didn’t love you all this time, parce que je croyais, que tu n’est qu’un outchitel (quelque chose comme un laquais, n’est-ce pas?), but nevertheless I have been faithful to you, parce que je suis bonne fille.’6

  ‘Come on, you’re lying! What about Albert, that swarthy little officer, do you think that I didn’t see you last time?’

  ‘Oh, oh, mais tu es …’

  ‘Come on, you’re lying, you’re lying; and what do you think, that I’m angry? And to hell with it; il faut que jeunesse se passe.7 You can’t send him packing if he was here before me and you love him. Just don’t give him any money, do you hear?’

  ‘So you’re not angry about that either? Mais tu es un vrai philosophe, sais-tu? Un vrai philosophe!’ she exclaimed ecstatically. ‘Eh bien, je t’aimerai, je t’aimerai – tu verras, tu sera content!’8

  And indeed, from that time on she really did seem to become somewhat attached to me, even friendly, and that was how our last ten days passed. I didn’t see any of the promised ‘stars’; but in certain respects she really did keep her word. What is more, she introduced me to Hortense, who was quite a remarkable woman in her own way, and whom our circle had dubbed Thérèse-philosophe9 …

  However, there’s no need to enlarge on that; it might make a story on its own, with its own colouring, which I don’t want to insert into this tale. The fact of the matter is that I wished with all my might that it would all end as quickly as possible. But our hundred thousand francs sufficed, as I said earlier, for almost a month, which genuinely surprised me: at the very least, Blanche spent 80,000 of that money buying things for herself, and we lived on no more than 20,000 francs and – nevertheless it sufficed. Blanche, who towards the end was almost candid with me (at least she wasn’t lying to me about some things), owned up that at least the debts that she had been forced to incur wouldn’t fall on me. ‘I didn’t have you sign any of the bills or notes,’ she said to me, ‘because I felt sorry for you; another woman would certainly have done so and got you sent to prison. You see, you see how much I love you and how good I am! This damned wedding alone is going to cost me a lot!’

  We really did have a wedding. It took place at the very end of our month together, and it may be assumed that the very last dregs of my hundred thousand francs went to pay for it; that was the end of the business, that is, that was how our month together ended, after which I formally retired.

  This was what happened: the general arrived a week after we settled in Paris. He came straight to Blanche and from the very first visit all but lived with us. He had, it’s true, a little apartment of his own somewhere. Blanche greeted him joyfully, with shrieks and laughter, and even rushed to embrace him; it transpired that she wouldn’t let go of him and he had to follow her around everywhere: on the boulevard, riding in the carriage, to the theatre and to visit acquaintances. The general was still fit for s
uch things; he was rather imposing and decent looking – almost tall, with dyed side whiskers and moustaches (he had served in the Cuirassiers),10 with a distinguished face, although it was somewhat flabby. His manners were impeccable, a tailcoat sat well on him. In Paris he started wearing his decorations. With such a man not only was it possible to take a stroll on the boulevard, but if one may put it like this, it’s even to be recommended. The good and clueless general was terribly pleased by all this; he hadn’t counted on it at all when he came to see us on his arrival in Paris. He made his appearance practically shaking with fear; he thought that Blanche would start shouting and order that he be sent packing; and that’s why when things worked out as they did, he went into raptures and spent the whole of that month in a state of inane rapture; and that was how I left him. It was here that I learned the details of what happened to him after our sudden departure from Roulettenburg – that very same morning he had some sort of fit. He fell unconscious, and then for a whole week was almost like a raving madman. He was under the care of doctors, but he suddenly stopped all that, got on the train and turned up in Paris. It goes without saying, Blanche’s reception proved to be the very best medicine for him; but symptoms of his illness lingered long afterwards, despite his joyful and rapturous state of mind. He was utterly incapable of reasoning or even of carrying on any sort of mildly serious conversation; in such instances, he would merely keep repeating ‘Hm!’ to every word that was said and nodding his head – that was how he would get out of it. He often laughed, but it was a nervous, unhealthy laugh, as if he were about to go off into uncontrolled peals; sometimes he would sit for hours on end as dark as night, knitting his bushy eyebrows. There was a lot that he did not even remember; he had become dreadfully absent-minded and had adopted the habit of talking to himself. Blanche was the only one who could breathe some life into him; and the fits of dark and gloom, when he would hide himself in the corner, merely signified that he had not seen Blanche for a long time, or that Blanche had gone somewhere and not taken him with her, or, that as she was leaving, she hadn’t cosseted him. At the same time, he wouldn’t say what he wanted, and didn’t know himself that he was dark and sad. After sitting for an hour or two (I observed this twice, when Blanche had gone out for the whole day, probably to see Albert), he suddenly began to look about, started fussing, stole a glance over his shoulder and tried to recall something, as if he were searching for somebody; but not seeing anybody and not recalling what he wanted to ask, he would fall back into oblivion until Blanche herself would suddenly appear, gay, frisky, all dressed up, with her ringing laugh; she would run up to him and begin to pester and even to kiss him, which was something, however, she rarely granted. Once the general was so delighted that he even burst into tears – I was even surprised.