Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Penguin Classics (2003)

It is better to be led by the nose on occasion than to find oneself quite without a nose at all, as a certain ailing marquis pronounced quite recently during confession to his holy Jesuit father. I was there, it was simply charming. 'Return to me my nose!' he said. 'My son,' the pater prevaricated, 'all is accomplished according to the unknowable destinies of Providence and an apparent disaster sometimes brings in its wake an exceptional, though invisible advantage. If stern fortune has deprived you of your nose, then your advantage is that all the rest of your life no one will ever dare to tell you that you have been led by the nose.' 'Holy father, that is no consolation!' the despairing marquis exclaimed, 'on the contrary, I would be only too delighted to be led by the nose every day for the rest of my life, if only it were in its proper place!' 'My son,' the pater sighed, 'it is wrong to demand all blessings at once, and this is already a complaint against Providence, which even now has not forgotten you; for if you cry, as you cried just now, that you would be ready to be led by the nose all the rest of your life, then even now your desire has been fulfilled, though obliquely: for, having lost your nose, you are by that very fact being led by it...