Sobakevich prices the dead high

Fleeing Nozdryov, Chichikov's britska collides with a carriage carrying a golden-haired girl of sixteen whose face has "the roundness of a delicate fresh egg". Uncle Mityay and Uncle Minyay make the tangled harness worse. Chichikov watches her go, then prices her at two hundred thousand in dowry. At Sobakevich's — a heavy unpainted house whose owner made the architect discard a column — he meets a host resembling a medium-sized bear, whose face nature hewed with an axe, and whose walls carry full-length Greek generals with enormous haunches. Sobakevich calls the Governor a brigand and the whole town Judases, then eats half a side of mutton. To Chichikov's proposition he answers without blinking: a hundred roubles a soul. He praises his dead serfs by name — Mikheyev the carriage maker, Stepan Probka — as though they were living, and settles at two and a half. Learning that Plyushkin's serfs die like flies, Chichikov sets off there in secret.

The bargain conducted by someone who has understood the system perfectly. Sobakevich neither flinches nor moralises; he prices. His eulogies for dead craftsmen are the book's blackest joke and its clearest argument — the market can quote a corpse's skills without noticing it is a corpse. He also hands Chichikov the road to Plyushkin.