The mayor visited the inn and borrowed money from Herlestakov

The Governor’s visit to the inn is the first decisive face-to-face encounter between the local administration and Khlestakov, whom the Governor believes to be an incognito inspector from Saint Petersburg. Their exchange turns a mistaken identity into a transaction: Khlestakov asks for money because he cannot pay his bill, while the Governor treats the request as an opportunity to secure the supposed inspector’s goodwill. The comedy lies not only in the disparity between their understandings, but in how readily the Governor’s fear of scrutiny becomes a familiar act of corruption.

Background: an inspection feared

The Governor has already received word that an official has arrived with instructions to inspect the government, especially his district. He describes the visitor as coming incognito and carrying secret instructions. The news lands in a town whose authorities know there is much to conceal. The Governor has contemplated monitoring letters for information against him, and his preparations for a possible inspection include making a bridge appear properly guarded and disguising rubbish and neglect as evidence of public works. His fear is therefore not an abstract anxiety about procedure: he anticipates that the inspector may uncover practices and conditions for which he is responsible.

That expectation shapes the visit before the Governor knows anything about Khlestakov’s actual circumstances. The scene opens with the two men staring at one another, wide-eyed and frightened. The pause makes their unequal assumptions visible before either explains himself. The Governor sees an official whose judgment may determine his fate; Khlestakov sees a formidable local authority while worrying about his unpaid lodging and poor meals. Each man interprets the other’s nervousness through his own immediate concern.

The request and the Governor’s response

Khlestakov says that he will pay once money arrives from home. He complains that the innkeeper has supplied hard beef and disagreeable tea and has kept him hungry. These details give his request a practical, limited purpose: he wants cash to settle his account. The Governor, however, cannot read the complaint as an ordinary traveler’s predicament. He first tries to understand what Khlestakov wants, then offers assistance as a duty owed to strangers in town. His language presents the offer as hospitality and public service, even as his private calculation is driven by the inspection he fears.

Khlestakov asks to borrow two hundred rubles, adding that less would suffice. The Governor hands him four hundred instead. In an aside, he notes the excess and takes the acceptance as reassurance that matters will now proceed smoothly. The difference between the requested and delivered sums is the scene’s sharpest measure of their misapprehension: Khlestakov receives a useful loan, while the Governor believes he has made a protective payment to a powerful official. The Governor calls it a loan, but the amount and his expectation of favorable treatment give the exchange the shape of a bribe.

Confession beneath the cover story

The Governor’s fear also loosens his self-defense. He attributes his conduct to inexperience and insufficient means, says his salary cannot cover even tea and sugar, and minimizes the bribes he has taken as trifles for the table or a coat. He also denies beating the widow of a non-commissioned officer, calling the allegation a slander and blaming his enemies. His account mixes admission, excuse, and denial: he acknowledges taking improper payments while trying to make them sound small, and rejects a specific charge without resolving the wider pattern of abuse.

Khlestakov does not understand this as a confession addressed to an inspector. He says he has nothing to do with the Governor’s disputes with the townspeople. The Governor nevertheless offers money, and Khlestakov accepts it as a way out of immediate debt. Their exchange therefore does not depend on a deliberate bargain between accomplices. The Governor’s fear supplies the hidden meaning of his offer; Khlestakov’s financial need supplies its ordinary meaning. The same act satisfies both men momentarily, but for entirely different reasons.

Dramatic significance and the wider pattern

The encounter condenses the town’s administrative disorder into a small, legible action. The Governor’s public language elsewhere praises local vigilance and efficiency, while his private preparations rely on appearances and concealment. Here, too, the formal language of duty covers a personal attempt to influence an imagined superior. The money changes hands before any inspection has taken place, showing how quickly the threat of oversight prompts not honest disclosure but strategic accommodation.

The Governor’s later conduct confirms that this fear belongs to a broader pursuit of rank and security. He hopes that association with a man supposedly close to ministers and the court might eventually bring him promotion to general. Meanwhile, the merchants describe a very different administration: they accuse him of quartering soldiers on them, taking goods from their shops, and demanding cloth for his household. Set beside those complaints, his claim that he has accepted only trifles appears less like an adequate defense than a revealing measure of how he understands his own corruption. The inn encounter is thus both a plot hinge and a compact study of official self-deception: a frightened administrator turns a stranger’s request into a payment for imagined protection, while the recipient takes it at face value.