When Stories Become Shields — The Idiot

At noon General Ivolgin waits for Prince Myshkin, offended at being kept, yet already performing injured dignity as he returns a borrowed book and declares he is leaving Lebedeff's house forever. He breaks with the landlord over a ridiculous story about a wooden leg buried in Moscow, then turns the conversation toward his own past with growing heat. What begins as wounded pride becomes an epic memoir: the general as a ten-year-old page in 1812, noticed by Napoleon, promoted after another page dies, riding with Davoust and Roustan, hearing the emperor weep, and advising him to retreat from Moscow. Myshkin listens with painful courtesy, offering the flattery of a copybook sentence when the old man needs soothing, and the general grows drunk on his own narrative, tears and all. When he leaves, moved and grateful, Myshkin knows the liar will soon suspect pity and take offense. A bitter letter arrives ending their acquaintance because sympathy humiliates him. Later Colia finds his father in the street, first defiant, then babbling about shame, Eropegoff, and the King of Rome, until he collapses with what Colia calls a stroke. The chapter shows how grand stories can shield a ruined man until the body fails, and how compassion offered to a proud liar can feel like another wound.