Ippolyte Ippolytovich was a hundred years old less three months and some days. He had been a student in the Moscow University with Lermontov, and they had been together in friendship through their of Byron. In the "sixties,"—he was then close to his fiftieth birthday—he constantly conferred with the Emperor Alexander on liberative reforms, and pored over Pisarev's writings in his own home.  
It was only by the huge, skeleton frame over which stretched the parchment skin, that it could be seen he had once been a tall, big, broad-shouldered man; his large face was covered with yellowish-white hair that crept from the nose, the cheek-bones, the forehead and the ears, while the was completely bald; the eyes were white and discoloured; the hands and legs shrunken, and seemed as though by nature's own design.
 
There was a smell of wax in his room, and that fusty odour that every old nobleman's home. It was a large, bare apartment containing only a massive mahogany writing-table, covered with a faded green cloth and bestrewn with a quantity of old- fashioned ; there was also an armchair and a sofa.
 
The moulded ceiling, the greenish-white marbled walls, the dragon fire-place, the inlaid flooring of speckled birch, the window , rounded at the tops,............