“No, it is untrue,” said the elder.
“There is nothing of the kind in all the lives of the saints. What saint do you say the story is told of?” asked the Father Librarian.
“I do not know what saint. I do not know, and can’t tell. I was deceived. I was told the story. I had heard it, and do you know who told it? Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov here, who was so angry just now about Diderot. He it was who told the story.”
“I have never told it you, I never speak to you at all.”
“It is true you did not tell me, but you told it when I was present. It was three years ago. I mentioned it because by that ridiculous story you shook my faith, Pyotr Alexandrovitch. You knew nothing of it, but I went home with my faith shaken, and I have been getting more and more shaken ever since. Yes, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, you were the cause of a great fall. That was not a Diderot!”
Fyodor Pavlovitch got excited and pathetic, though it was perfectly clear to everyone by now that he was playing a part again. Yet Miüsov was stung by his words.
“What nonsense, and it is all nonsense,” he muttered. “I may really have told it, some time or other … but not to you. I was told it myself. I heard it in Paris from a Frenchman. He told me it was read at our mass from the Lives of the Saints … he was a very learned man who had made a special study of Russian statistics and had lived a long time in Russia. … I have not read the Lives of the Saints myself, and I am not going to read them … all sorts of things are said at dinner—we were dining then.”