In a wealthy estate, Kalez is slowly dying from angina pectoris, his sixty-eight-year-old master, a successful lawyer in the recent past. His family is looking forward to its end. He himself writes about this in a diary letter, which he addresses to his wife and in which he sums up his life.
As a child, he seems to be a "gloomy fellow", in which there was not what is called the "freshness of youth." However, he was proud and proud. And therefore, not possessing charm, he worked hard to achieve the title of first student wherever he had to study. The mother who raised him alone did not cherish the soul in her Louis. With the rest of humanity, his relationship was more complicated. Proud and at the same time vulnerable, he acted like this: "I purposely hastened to not like it, fearing that it would come out by itself."
And so, when he was twenty-three, a young girl from a wealthy bourgeois family fell in love with him. And he fell in love with her. The hero was shocked by the fact that "he can like, captivate, excite the girl's heart." “You once saved me from hell ...” - he admits to his wife in the diary. And then came five decades of "great silence ...".
The hero is trying to understand how, from a happy lover, he turned into an evil old man with a ball of snakes in his heart. To himself, he is also merciless in the diary.
The newlyweds loved in the evening, lying in bed, “whispering” about how the day went, or indulging in memories ... And then, at one such moment of special emotional closeness, his wife, his sweet Izya, admitted that she already had a groom, Rudolph . But, having learned that her two brothers had died of consumption, under the pressure of the family, he refused the wedding. And her parents were terribly afraid that there would be rumors about an illness in the family and Izya would not be married at all. Not noticing the state of Louis, she continues to make her completely innocent confessions. It turns out that Rudolph was "handsome, charming, liked by women." And the husband from these confessions "heart was breaking with flour ...".
So, everything was a lie and a deceit, so they didn’t love him, as he had imagined, but he simply turned up at the right time.
The wife, without suspecting it, plunged him "into hell."
However, alienation did not immediately turn into hatred. One case confirmed the complete indifference of his wife to him. Louis was a great lawyer. And once in court he acted as an advocate in the case of the Vilnius family. The wife took the blame for the attempt on her husband’s life, which the son actually committed. She did this not only for her son's sake, but also because it was a child of her beloved husband, and he asked her to take the blame on himself. Such love and such selflessness could not but shock the hero. He had a great defense. In connection with this case, all the newspapers wrote about him, his portraits were placed on the front pages - and only at home no one congratulated him, no one asked about anything ...
So gradually more and more alienation arises in the family. In the diary, he calls himself a lover of money, believing that he inherited this trait from his peasant mother. It seemed to him that only with the help of a wallet could he manage his family. “Gold attracts you, but defends me,” he writes in his diary, mentally sorting out the options for sharing the inheritance and reveling in the imaginary reaction of the children and his wife. His wife is afraid, the children are afraid and hate.
The hero reproaches his wife for having completely gone into caring for children, then for grandchildren, expelling him from life, without trying to understand him. For her and children, he is only a source of well-being. The wife considers herself a believer - they sacredly observe all religious holidays with their children, go to church. But when her husband deliberately provokes her into religious disputes, it is revealed how superficial this faith is, how little it corresponds to the real life of her wife and children. Neither in herself, nor in her children there is true Christian love and humility, it all comes down to caring for money.
The hero is trying to find contact with the children, but only one - the youngest of Marie’s daughters, “with her childhood caress” touches his heart. But she dies due to the ignorance of the doctor. The hero is hard on this loss. He always remembers her warmth, and this helps him survive among the wolf pack, which he imagines as his own family. And the hero recalls yet another affection - to Luke, his nephew, whom he adopted, because his mother, the wife’s sister, died. He fell in love with the boy because he was “so unlike” him. Sincere, open, cheerful and direct, he was completely devoid of the love of money, which depresses the hero in himself and his children, he alone did not look at him "like a scarecrow." But Luke dies in the war.
Abbe Arduin lives in the family of Louis — he understands the hero’s soul, speaks simple words that shock him, accustomed to the callousness of his family. These words: "You are good." And they turn him away from an unjust act and force him to see another person in himself.
The hero, in order to somehow drown out the pain, take revenge on his wife, embarked on "all the grave", not looking for love, but avenging her deception. He also had a long romance, from which his son was born, but that woman left for Paris, not having endured the despotism of the hero.
All this worries children who do not know how he will manage the inheritance. And one evening they gather in the garden and discuss how to make their father crazy. The hero is furious. Here is a real ball of snakes. His own children are capable of such treachery! And he decides to go to Paris in the morning in order to transfer all his enormous fortune to his illegitimate son. Before leaving, he had a conversation with his wife, who was destined to be the last. From him, the hero is surprised to understand that his wife suffered because of him and, perhaps, even loved. "I did not dare to put a single child with me in bed for the night - I expected you to come ..." Hope sobered. But he still leaves for Paris. There, he accidentally sees his son Huber and son-in-law Alfred, who tracked him down and came to prevent him from carrying out his plan. He belatedly learns about the death of his wife and only has time for her funeral. She never had time to explain, she would never read his diary. "Now nothing can be rebuilt again ... ... she died without knowing that I was not only a monster and an executioner, but that another person lived in me."
There is a difficult explanation with the children - son Huber and daughter Genevieve. The hero explains that he feels all the time, "like a seriously ill old man against a whole flock of young wolves ...". They are justified by the fact that their behavior was "legitimate self-defense."
And all that was accumulating in him good things suddenly made him decide - to give the children the multimillion-dollar inheritance, stipulating the rent for the illegitimate son.
"I pulled out of my soul that which I thought was deeply attached to ... However, I only felt relief, a purely physical sense of relief: it was easier for me to breathe."
Reflecting on this, the hero exclaims: “All my life I have been a captive of passions that really did not own me! Think wake up at sixty-eight years old! To be reborn before death! ”
And yet he learns joy and reassurance with his granddaughter Yanina, from whom the impolite, empty, but beloved husband of Fili escaped and who, along with her daughter, finds refuge with his grandfather, And when the great-granddaughter climbed onto his knees and he pressed against her soft like fluff, to her hair, to her cheeks, appeasement visited him. Remembering Marie, Luke, Abbot Arduen, he accepted faith in his heart, realized that his family was just a “cartoon for Christian life”. He defeated his ball of snakes.
The novel ends with two letters: Hubert to Genevieve, in which he reports about the death of his father and about strange notes that his father left, the inner meaning of which he did not understand, and Ioannina to Huber, in which she asks permission to read the diary of the grandfather, who actually returned her to life.
It seems that she was the only one from the family who understood the grandfather’s proud, restless soul: “I consider him right before us, because where our treasures were, our heart was there - we only thought about the inheritance, which we were afraid to lose <...> All the forces of the soul we were striving to possess material wealth, while grandfather <...> Will you understand me if I say that his heart was not where his treasures were <...> He was the most believing of us ... "
