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The Most Serene Prince Ménshikoff quarrelled with the Vice-Chancellor Shafiroff; the Prince had called the latter a Jew.

“I am a Jew, but you are a pieman,” retorted Shafiroff, “Your father had not even a spoon to eat his soup with. You have been dragged up, ‘taken from the mire you have been made a sire’”—

“You dirty Jew, I’ll crack you on my nail like a flea, and nothing but a little moisture will remain.”

They went on railing at one another for a long time. Russians are as a rule very versatile in ribaldry; I think it is impossible to hear more obscene language anywhere else; the air is full of it. In one of the vilest expressions used by young and old, the term mother is coupled with the most obscene of terms: it is known as the ‘mother-word.’

Having exhausted their resources of abuse, the dignitaries began to spit into one another’s faces, while the guests stood round looking on and laughing. Here such scuffles are quite common, and involve no further consequences.

Prince James Dolgorúki had a tussle with the Prince Caesar Romodanovsky. These two venerable old men, both white with age, abused one another in most insulting terms, then tore one another’s hair, and began strangling and beating one another with their fists. When some of the onlookers tried to separate them, they drew out their swords.