justice in Ryepin's title for him—Lorenzo. He should have lived in a gilded castle, and have trodden on luxurious carpets, attended by a splendid suite. This would have suited him: he was born for the part. With what stateliness he awaited his guests at the top of the wide, festal staircase leading from his room to the dining-room! If some music had suddenly struck up, one would not have felt surprised.
He wrote his letters on expensive paper in a broad, masterful hand, as if they were manifestos and not letters, and in what an elevated, triumphant, richly decorated style, in which every phrase was adorned with a garland of magnificent periods!
His house was always full of people: guests, relations, a large staff of servants, and children—crowds of children, his own and others'—his temperament demanded a broad and full life.
There are people who seem to have been created for oppression and poverty: it is difficult to conceive Dostoevsky as degenerate. To do so would be unnaturally perverse. Similarly, Leonid Andreyev was meant to be a magnate: every one of his movements suggested the grandee. His beautiful, chiselled, decorative face; his graceful, slightly stout figure; his dignified, light, step all fitted in with the part of a magnificent duke which he later played so superbly. This was his greatest rôle and he organically grew into it. He was one of those talented, ambitious, pompous people, who thirst to be the captain on every ship, the archbishop in every cathedral. He would not consent to play second fiddle in anything; even at gorodki he wished to be the first and only one. He was born to march at the head of some splendid procession, by the light of torches and to the sound of bells.
His enormous fireplace consumed incredible quantities of wood, but the room remained in such icy cold that it was terrible to go into it.
The great stone blocks bore so heavily on the three hundred-weight beams that the ceiling collapsed and it was impossible to eat in the dining-room.
The huge hydraulic pump, used for bringing water from the Black River, went wrong in the first month apparently, and remained like a rusty skeleton, as if rejoicing in its uselessness, until it was sold for scrap iron.
