Let the questioner go out

Oblonsky, who enjoys complications in spheres he knows, is dazed by this one and feels a heaviness in his head: Mary Sanina glad her child is dead, a wish to smoke, the brandy, the fear that they may make him pray. He nearly snores, wakes in fright at the words 'He is asleep', and is relieved to find they refer to Landau — whose sleep delights them as his own would have offended. Lydia Ivanovna calls Karenin mon ami and tells him to give the Frenchman his hand; Karenin catches against the table on the way. Landau, eyes shut, says the person who arrived last, the one who questions, must go out. Oblonsky asks whether it is he, is told it is, and — forgetting the favour he came for and his sister's affairs — leaves on tiptoe and runs into the street as from an infected house. The French Theatre and champagne do not restore him; he finds Peter Oblonsky being carried up the stairs drunk, and cannot sleep for the shame of the evening. Next day Karenin refuses the divorce.

Anna's fate is decided by a sleeping Frenchman telling the room that the questioner must leave, and Tolstoy declines to say whether Landau is asleep or pretending because it makes no difference. Oblonsky, who is never in low spirits, cannot sleep for disgust. The chapter's flat last sentence — a definite refusal, based on what the Frenchman said — is the novel's coldest piece of causation.