1 Yet he need not have flown into such a passion.
2 For human passions are as numberless as is the sand of the seashore, and go on to become his most insistent of masters.
3 Higher powers govern those passions, and in them is something which will call to him, and refuse to be silenced, to the end of his life.
4 But there are passions of which a man cannot rid himself, seeing that they are born with him at his birth, and he has no power to abjure them.
5 Neither passion nor care nor aught of the nature of agitation or anxiety of mind had ventured to touch his unsullied face, or to lay a single wrinkle thereon.
6 They were of the kind which pleases mostly middle-aged bachelors and old men who are accustomed to seek in the ballet and similar frivolities a further spur to their waning passions.
7 In the same way may the passion which drew our Chichikov onwards have been one that was independent of himself; in the same way may there have lurked even in his cold essence something which will one day cause men to humble themselves in the dust before the infinite wisdom of God.
8 Yes, it is a common thing to see not only an overmastering passion, but also a passion of the most petty order, arise in a man who was born to better things, and lead him both to forget his greatest and most sacred obligations, and to see only in the veriest trifles the Great and the Holy.
9 Yet, despite the fact that the springs and the thread of this romance will not DEPEND upon them, but only touch upon them, and occasionally include them, the author has a passion for circumstantiality, and, like the average Russian, such a desire for accuracy as even a German could not rival.