Having served excellently, nobly, his father lived by means of debts; gave three balls yearly and squandered everything at last. Fate guarded Eugene: at first, Madame looked after him; later, Monsieur replaced her. The child was boisterous but nice. Monsieur l'Abbe, a poor wretch of a Frenchman, not to wear out the infant, would teach him everything in play, bothered him not with stern moralization, scolded him slightly for his pranks, and to Letniy Sad took him for walks. IV Then, when tumultuous youth's season for Eugene came, season of hopes and tender melancholy, Monsieur was ousted from the place. Now my Onegin is at large: hair cut after the latest fashion, dressed like a London Dandy — and finally he saw the World. In French impeccably he could express himself and write, danced the mazurka lightly, and bowed unconstrainedly — what would you more? The World decided he was clever and very nice. V All of us had a bit of schooling in something and somehow: hence education, God be praised, is in our midst not hard to flaunt. Onegin was, in the opinion of many (judges resolute and stern), a learned fellow but a pedant. He had the happy talent, without constraint, in conversation slightly to touch on everything, keep silent, with an expert's learned air, during a grave discussion, and provoke the smiles of ladies with the fire of unexpected epigrams. VI Latin has gone at present out of fashion; still, to tell you the truth, he had enough knowledge of Latin to make out epigraphs, descant on Juvenal, put at the bottom of a letter vale, and he remembered, though not without fault, two lines from the Aeneid. He had no urge to rummage in the chronological dust of the earth's historiography, but anecdotes of days gone by, from Romulus to our days he did keep in his memory. VII Lacking the lofty passion not to spare life for the sake of sounds, an iamb from a trochee — no matter how we strove — he could not tell apart; dispraised Homer, Theocritus, but read, in compensation, Adam Smith, and was a deep economist: that is, he could assess the way a state grows rich, and what it lives upon, and why it needs not gold when it has got the simple product. His father could not understand him, and mortgaged his lands. VIII All Eugene knew besides I have no leisure to recount; but where he was a veritable genius, what he more firmly knew than all the arts, what since his prime had been to him toil, anguish, joy, what occupied the livelong day his fretting indolence — was the art of soft passion which Naso sang, wherefore a sufferer he ended his brilliant and tumultuous span in Moldavia, in the wild depth of steppes, far from his Italy.
