Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VI).djvu/103

Rh cattle, but also of Bismarck, of the war of 1866 and of Napoleon III., whom Kallomyetsev dubbed a capital fellow. The young kammerjunker gave expression to the most retrograde opinions; he went so far at last as to propose─ostensibly as a joke, it's true─the toast given by a gentleman, a friend of his, at a certain birthday banquet: 'I drink to the only principles I acknowledge,' the ardent landowner had exclaimed, 'to the knout and to Roederer!'

Valentina Mihalovna frowned, and observed that this quotation was de très mauvais goût. Sipyagin, on the contrary, expressed the most liberal opinions; amicably, and rather carelessly, he opposed Kallomyetsev; he even jeered at him a little.

'Your apprehensions in regard to the emancipation, my dear Semyon Petrovitch', he said to him, among other things, 'remind me of a memorial drawn up by our respected and excellent friend Alexey Ivanitch Tveritinov in 1860, and read by him everywhere in the Petersburg drawing-rooms. There was one particularly nice sentence describing how the liberated peasant would infallibly go, torch in hand, over the face of the whole country. You should have seen dear good Alexey Ivanitch, with distended cheeks and round eyes, bringing out of his infantine mouth,