De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem

agree in the XIX century to be called Plenira, Temira, Selena, or Uslad. I soon rebelled against her classical name and advised her, to spite Boileau Nicolas Boileau, the French poet and critic. (*), to call herself Toinon; and when the second volume of Onegin came out, I firmly advised her to remain Tatiana, as the priest had christened her. The change of name helped little: Tanya, as before, at every meeting with the pale companion of the globe, made a lyrical appeal to her; as before, she compared her life to flowers thrown into the "tempestuous waves" of the Klyazma River; she loved in her leisure hours to weep over her bitter lot, over the persecutions of fate (which, incidentally, pursued her very modestly, such that its blows were quite imperceptible from the outside), and over the fact that "no one in the world understands her." This is a La Fontaine element; no better was the Genlis Stéphanie Félicité, Comtesse de Genlis, known for her didactic moral tales. element—the moral one: she, who knew I read God-knows-what, implored me not to touch Werther Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther., recommended moral books, and so on. Now all this seems ridiculous to me, but back then Tanya was a valkyrie to me: I obediently listened to her prophecies. She knew her authority very well, and therefore she oppressed me; when I became indignant and she saw the danger of losing her power, tears would flow from her eyes, friendly, warm reproaches from her lips; I would feel sorry for her; I seemed guilty to myself, and her throne stood unshakable once again. It must be noted that girls around the age of 18 generally love to school a boy who falls into their hands, and over whom they test the weapons prepared for more important conquests; but then, how they are schooled by boys later, for eighteen years in a row, and the further it goes, the worse it gets! And so, I listened to Tanya, played the sentimentalist, and at times, moral sententiae, pale and thin, served as the finale to my speeches. I imagine that in those moments I was very ridiculous; my lively character was difficult to bind with the candy-wrapper of false sensitivity, and it did not suit me at all to sculpt moral sententiae out of treacle without the ginger of Genlis’s morality. But what could I do! I went through this, and perhaps it was not so bad:

(*) And to change, without respect for the ear or the sound,
Lycidas into Pierrot, and Philis into Toinon. Art Poétique.