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A DESPERATE CHARACTER
She sighed. 'No, no child. . . . Is it likely?' And her tears flowed faster than ever.
'And so that was how Misha's troubled wanderings had ended,' the old man P. wound up his narrative. 'You will agree with me, I am sure, that I'm right in calling him a desperate character; but you will most likely agree too that he was not like the desperate characters of to-day; still, a philosopher, you must admit, would find a family likeness between him and them. In him and in them there's the thirst for self-destruction, the wretchedness, the dissatisfaction.. . . And what it all comes from, I leave the philosopher to decide.'
Bougivalle, November 1881.
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