I have, for example, a terrible amour propre. I am as insecure and touchy as a hunchback or a dwarf, yet there have indeed been moments when if I had happened to be slapped, I might even have been glad of it. I say it seriously: surely I'd have managed to discover some sort of pleasure in that as well - the pleasure of despair, of course, but it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur, especially when one is all too highly conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And here, with this slap - you'll simply be crushed by the consciousness of what sort of slime you've been reduced to. But chiefly, however you shuffle, it still comes out that I always come out as the first to blame for everything and, what's most offensive, blamelessly to blame, according to the laws of nature, so to speak. I'm to blame, first, because I'm more intelligent than everyone around me. (I've always considered myself more intelligent than everyone around me, and, would you believe, have even felt slightly ashamed of it. At least I've somehow averted my eyes all my life, and never could look people straight in the face.) I'm to blame, finally, because even if there were any magnanimity in me, I would be the one most tormented by the consciousness of its utter futility. For I would surely be able to do nothing with my magnanimity: neither to forgive, because my offender might have hit me according to the laws of nature, and the laws of nature cannot be forgiven; nor to forget, because even though it's the laws of nature, it's still offensive. Finally, even if I should want to be altogether unmagnanimous, if, on the contrary,
I should wish to take revenge on my offender, I wouldn't be able to take revenge on anyone in any way, because I surely wouldn't dare to do anything even if I could. Why wouldn't I dare? About that I would like to say a couple of words in particular.
III
What happens, for example, with people who know how to take revenge and generally how to stand up for themselves? Once they are overcome, say, by vengeful feeling, then for the time there is simply nothing left in their whole being but this feeling. Such a gentleman just lunges straight for his goal like an enraged bull, horns lowered, and maybe only a wall can stop him. (Incidentally: before a wall, these gentlemen - that is, ingenuous people and active figures - quite sincerely fold. For them a wall is not a deflection, as it is, for example, for us, people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not a pretext for turning back, a pretext which our sort usually doesn't believe in but is always very glad to have. No, they fold in all sincerity. For them a wall possesses something soothing, morally resolving and final, perhaps even something mystical… But of the wall later.) Well, sirs, it is just such an ingenuous man that I regard as the real, normal man, the way his tender mother - nature - herself wished to see him when she so kindly conceived him on earth. I envy such a man to the point of extreme bile. He is stupid, I won't argue with you about that, but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful. And I am the more convinced of this, so to speak, suspicion, seeing that if, for example, one takes the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of heightened consciousness, who came, of course, not from the bosom of nature but from a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect that, too), this retort man sometimes folds before his antithesis so far that he honestly regards himself, with all his heightened consciousness, as a mouse and not a man. A highly conscious mouse, perhaps, but a mouse all the same, whereas here we have a man, and consequently… and so on… And, above all, it is he, he himself, who regards himself as a mouse; no one asks him to; and that is an important point.
Let us now have a look at this mouse in action. Suppose, for example, that it, too, is offended (and it is almost always offended), and it, too, wishes to take revenge. For it may have stored up even more spite than l'homme de la nature et de la verite. 4 The nasty, base little desire to pay the offender back with the same evil may scratch still more nastily in it than in l'homme de la nature et de la verite, because l'homme de le nature et de la verite, with his innate stupidity, regards his revenge quite simply as justice; whereas the mouse, as a result of its heightened consciousness, denies it any justice. Things finally come down to the business itself, to the act of revenge itself. The wretched mouse, in addition to the one original nastiness, has already managed to fence itself about with so many other nastinesses in the form of questions and doubts; it has padded out the one question with so many unresolved questions that, willy-nilly, some fatal slops have accumulated around it, some stinking filth consisting of its dubieties, anxieties, and, finally, of the spit raining on it from the ingenuous figures who stand solemnly around it like judges and dictators, guffawing at it from all their healthy gullets. Of course, nothing remains for it but to wave the whole thing aside with its little paw and, with a smile of feigned contempt, in which it does not believe itself, slip back shamefacedly into its crack. There, in its loathsome, stinking underground, our offended, beaten-down, and derided mouse at once immerses itself in cold, venomous, and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years on end it will recall its offense to the last, most shameful details, each time adding even more shameful details of its own, spitefully taunting and chafing itself with its fantasies. It will be ashamed of its fantasies, but all the same it will recall everything, go over everything, heap all sorts of figments on itself, under the pretext that they, too, could have happened, and forgive nothing. It may even begin to take revenge, but somehow in snatches, with piddling things, from behind the stove, incognito, believing neither in its right to revenge itself nor in the success of its vengeance, and knowing beforehand that it will suffer a hundred times more from all its attempts at revenge than will the object of its vengeance, who will perhaps not even scratch at the bite. On its deathbed it will again recall everything, adding the interest accumulated over all that time, and… But it is precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this conscious burying oneself alive from grief for forty years in the underground, in this assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness of one's position, in all this poison of unsatisfied desires penetrating inward, in all this fever of hesitations, of decisions taken forever, and repentances coming again a moment later, that the very sap of that strange pleasure I was talking about consists. It is so subtle, sometimes so elusive of consciousness, that people who are even the slightest bit narrow-minded, or who simply have strong nerves, will not understand a single trace of it. "Perhaps," you will add, grinning, "those who have never been slapped will also not understand" - thereby politely hinting that I, too, may have experienced a slap in my life, and am therefore speaking as a connoisseur. I'll bet that's what you think. But calm yourselves, gentlemen, I have not received any slaps, though it's all quite the same to me whatever you may think about it. Perhaps I myself am sorry for having dealt out too few slaps in my life. But enough, not another word on this subject which you find so extremely interesting.