Manilov gives them away free

After a week of dinners, Chichikov sets out for Manilov's. The narrator pauses over his two serfs: Petrushka, who sleeps in his master's cast-off frock-coat and reads anything for the pleasure of watching letters become words, and the coachman Selifan. Manilovka proves thirty versts rather than fifteen: a bare house on a windswept knob above two hundred grey huts, and a summer-house labelled "Temple of Solitary Meditation". Manilov is blond, blue-eyed and pleasing "mixed with a large dollop of sugar" — a man with no mania of any kind, whose book has stood open at page fourteen for two years and whose bridge across the pond exists only in talk. Over dinner with the sons Themistoclius and Alcides, the courtesies pile up. Then, in the study, Chichikov asks to buy the peasants who have died but remain on the census. Manilov drops his chibouk, fears his guest is mad, and finally hands the dead souls over for nothing.

The template chapter: arrival, courtesy, dinner, then the proposition sprung in a private room. Gogol sets the easiest case first — a man with no substance to resist with — so the gallery can escalate. Manilov's page fourteen and his imaginary bridge establish the book's real subject: things that exist only on paper.