Hippolyte's pistol
Hippolyte Terentieff's pocket pistol is a wretched, crooked little weapon that he had procured as a boy, "at that droll age when the stories of duels and highwaymen begin to delight one." It is incapable of carrying farther than fifteen paces at the most, yet he is convinced that it will "send your skull flying well enough if you pressed the muzzle of it against your temple." The pistol comes with a bag containing a couple of old bullets and an old flask with enough powder for two or three charges. This is the instrument upon which Hippolyte stakes the entire dramatic weight of his "Necessary Explanation"—the long, feverish confession he writes during the night before the party and reads aloud to the assembled guests at dawn.
The Weapon and Its Preparation
Hippolyte packs the pistol himself, along with the powder and bullets, into a small case that he places in his bag. He deliberately misleads Colia Ivolgin into believing that Colia had packed it, a small deception that later allows him to claim he had forgotten the percussion cap. On the night of the reading, after finishing his manuscript, he produces a sealed packet from his breast-pocket with theatrical flourish, and the sight of it instantly electrifies the room. When Lebedeff demands that he surrender the weapon, Hippolyte hands over the key to his bag and directs Colia to retrieve the case from under the table in the prince's study, on condition that the pistol be returned to him the next morning. This conditional surrender is itself a performance: he means to use the weapon before morning comes.
The Climax and the Misfire
After drinking to the sun's health, Hippolyte breaks away from the prince and reaches the terrace steps. Keller, who had suspected something from the way Hippolyte kept his right hand in his pocket while speaking, rushes after him but is too late. Hippolyte raises the pistol to his temple and pulls the trigger. There follows a sharp metallic click—but no report. The pistol has misfired. Keller seizes the weapon, and Hippolyte, who had apparently believed himself shot, falls forward into his arms. When the pistol is examined, Keller announces the cause: "There was no cap in it." Hippolyte then sobs hysterically, wringing his hands and swearing that he had forgotten—"accidentally, and not on purpose"—to put a cap in, that he had ten of them at least in his pocket, that he had not liked to put one in beforehand for fear of an accidental explosion in his pocket, and that in the heat of the moment he had forgotten all about it.
The Aftermath and Thematic Significance
The misfire transforms the scene from tragedy to farce. The first sensation of alarm gives way to amusement; some burst out laughing, finding malicious satisfaction in the joke. Hippolyte's grand gesture—the culmination of his "last conviction," his philosophical defiance of death and nature—collapses into a humiliating pratfall. He throws himself upon the prince and Evgenie Pavlovitch, begging Keller to return the pistol so he can prove his honour, but he is now "dishonoured, for ever." The pistol's failure is not merely mechanical; it is the material correlative of the novel's persistent theme: the chasm between the sublime idea and its degraded actualization. Hippolyte had written in his confession that he wished to die gazing at the sun, to make a protest against the blind, dumb force of nature. Instead, he produces a click and a sob. The pistol, like its owner, is a thing of pathetic inadequacy—crooked, short-ranged, incapable of carrying out the grand design entrusted to it. Yet the episode also reveals something of the prince's character: when Keller later declares that anyone who casts doubt on Hippolyte's good faith or hints that the cap was forgotten intentionally will have to answer to him, no one replies. The prince himself, though deeply distressed, does not mock. The pistol's failure becomes, in the end, not merely a joke at Hippolyte's expense but a strange kind of mercy—a reprieve that allows him to live a little longer, however miserably.
