“My friend,” said Stepan Trofimovitch in great excitement “ savez-vous , that wonderful and⁠ ⁠… extraordinary passage has been a stumbling-block to me all my life⁠ ⁠… dans ce livre ⁠ ⁠… so much so that I remembered those verses from childhood. Now an idea has occurred to me; une comparaison. A great number of ideas keep coming into my mind now. You see, that’s exactly like our Russia, those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores, all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils great and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and ages. Oui, cette Russie que j’aimais toujours. But a great idea and a great Will will encompass it from on high, as with that lunatic possessed of devils⁠ ⁠… and all those devils will come forth, all the impurity, all the rottenness that was putrefying on the surface⁠ ⁠… and they will beg of themselves to enter into swine; and indeed maybe they have entered into them already! They are we, we and those⁠ ⁠… and Petrusha and