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- CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 261
set up to him after his death, and so all is permitted. No, such
people it seems are not of flesh but of bronze!"
One sudden irrelevant idea almost made him laugh. Napoleon,
the pyramids, Waterloo, and a wretched skinny old woman, a
pawnbroker with a red trunk under her bed — it's a nice hash
for Porfiry Petrovitch to digest! How can they digest it! It's
too inartistic. "A Napoleon creep under an old woman's bed!
Ugh, how loathsome!"
At moments he felt he was raving. He sank into a state of
feverish excitement. "The old woman is of no consequence,"
he thought, hotly and incoherently. "The old woman was a
mistake perhaps, but she is not what matters! The old woman
was only an illness. ... I was in a hurry to overstep. ... I
didn't kill a human being, but a principle! I killed the principle,
but I didn't overstep, I stopped on this side. ... I was only
capable of killing. And it seems I wasn't even capable of that
. . . Principle? Why was that fool Razumihin abusing the so-
cialists? They are industrious, commercial people; 'the happiness
of air is their case. No, life is only given to me once and I shall
never have it again; I don't want to wait for 'the happiness of
all.' I want to live myself, or else better not live at all. I simply
couldn't pass by my mother starving, keeping my trouble in my
pocket while I waited for the 'happiness of all.' I am putting my
little brick into the happiness of all and so my heart is at peace.
Ha-ha! Why have you let me slip? I only live once, I too want,
. . . Ech, I am an aesthetic louse and nothing more," he added
suddenly, laughing like a madman. "Yes, I am certainly a louse,"
he went on, clutching at the idea, gloating over it and playing
with it with vindictive pleasure. "In the first place, because I
can reason that I am one, and secondly, because for a month past
I have been troubling benevolent Providence, calling it to wit-
ness that not for my own fleshly lusts did I undertake it, but
with a grand and noble object — ha-ha! Thirdly, because I aimed
at carrying it out as justly as possible, weighing, measuring and
calculating. Of all the lice I picked out the most useless one
and proposed to take from her only as much as I needed for the
first step, no more nor less (so the rest would have gone to a
monastery, according to her will, ha-ha!). And what shows
that I am utterly a louse," he added, grinding his teeth, "is
that I am perhaps- viler and more loathsome than the louse I
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