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This young man was dressed in a threadbare blue cloth coat lined with fox fur, that had once been smart, and dirty hempen convict trousers, over which were pulled his thin, dirty, trodden-down boots. On his thin, weak legs were heavy chains which hampered his irresolute movements.
The two opposing kinds of pride confronting one another, I can see, even in this Bastille; the gentleman's, all negligent indifference; the peasants, all trodden-down sentiment, and passionate revenge. "'You know, Doctor, that it is among the Rights of these Nobles to harness us common dogs to carts, and drive us. They so harnessed him and drove him.
Round about in a big circle tables and benches had been placed where the different families enjoyed the supper they had brought with them, and through it all a jubilant, giggling, staring crowd was pressing, eager for either love or a good hand-to-hand fight. The concert was already finished, the dancing had begun; on the firm, trodden-down moss the couples circled round breathless and stumbling.
But the soldier stood aside, examining the trodden-down heel of his boot, and was quite indifferent to the policeman's perplexity. "Those whose business it is don't care. Is it right to do men to death like this? A convict is a convict, but still he is a man," different voices were heard saying in the crowd. "Put his head up higher, and give him some water," said Nekhludoff.
The mother smoothed the folds of her dyed silk dress before a large Venetian mirror in the wall, and in her trodden-down shoes briskly ascended the carpeted stairs. "My dear," she said to her son, once more stimulating him by a touch, "you promised me!" The son, lowering his eyes, followed her quietly.
But the gratification of having at last been honest with you may compensate even for the loss of your respect. 'The matter is a small one to tell, after all. What will you say on learning that I am not the trodden-down "lady by birth" that you have supposed me?
With thin, straggling wisps of hair thrown, as it were, on his head, a dull glimmer only in his one eye, and his whole features of a crafty, selfish character—such he was; clad in a long, threadbare, snuff-coloured great-coat, reaching almost to his heels, and which served to hide the trowsers, the frayed ends of which explained their condition; on his bare feet he wore a pair of trodden-down slippers, with upper leathers gaping in front with open mouths; a despicable rascal to look at, and yet this was a brother of one of the magistrates of Vienna.
I followed this course: it led me back to the glade. Doubtless the horse had made it. I was about to go back along the path, when I noticed a similar trodden-down appearance along one side of the stream where it left the glade. Hoping little, I examined this. It brought me, after a few yards, to a clear piece of turf swelling up around the roots of an oak.
The head in which so many splendid pictures and grand schemes were agitating, looked generally something like a bundle of flax; she never noticed the holes and specks in her dress, nor her ragged stockings and trodden-down shoes; she forgot all her little, every-day business, and whatever she had in her hand she either lost or dropped. She had, besides, a passion for cracking almonds.
Old riding-boots with dusty spurs and a pair of veldschoens stood by the wall; a pair of trodden-down carpet slippers lay beside a big cheap zinc bath that stood there, full of cold water; some well-used pipes were on the chest of drawers, with a tin of Virginia; and an old brown camel's-hair dressing-gown hung over a castorless, shabby, American-cloth-covered armchair.
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