About the Author: Leo Tolstoy

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian writer of novels and short stories. He is a master of realistic fiction and is widely considered one of the world's greatest novelists.

  • Best-known novels: War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877)
  • Early fame: Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based on his experiences in the Crimean War
  • Semi-autobiographical trilogy: Childhood, Boyhood and Youth (1855-1858)
  • Novellas: The Death of Ivan Ilych, Family Happiness, Hadji Murad

After a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, Tolstoy became known as a moral thinker and social reformer, with strict moral and simple-living views.

About the story. "Too Dear!" is adapted from an episode in Guy de Maupassant's French work Sur l'eau (in English, Afloat). It was translated from Russian into English by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

[Exam Tip] — The title means "too expensive". Here "dear" means costly, not beloved.

Setting: Monaco, the "Toy Kingdom"

  • Monaco is a tiny kingdom near the borders of France and Italy, on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.
  • It has only about seven thousand inhabitants. If all its land were divided, there would not be even an acre for each person.
  • Yet it has a real "kinglet" (a little king) with a palace, courtiers, ministers, a bishop, generals and an army of only sixty men.

Taxes. There are taxes on tobacco, on wine and spirits, and a poll-tax (a tax on each person). But the people are too few for these taxes to support the Prince and his court.

The special revenue. The Prince's main income comes from a gaming house where people play roulette. Whether players win or lose, the keeper takes a percentage, and from his profits he pays a large sum to the Prince.

Why Monaco has a monopoly. Some small German rulers once ran similar gaming houses, but they were forbidden because the houses did so much harm - people lost everything, even money that was not theirs, and then drowned or shot themselves in despair. Nobody stopped the Prince of Monaco, so his gaming house became the only one left in Europe, and everyone who wants to gamble goes there.

The Prince knows it is a "dirty business", but as the proverb says, "You can't earn stone palaces by honest labour."

Summary, Part 1: The Murder and the Costly Execution

  • A murder is committed in Monaco - the first ever among its peaceable people.
  • The judges, prosecutors, jurymen and barristers try the case with great ceremony. The criminal is sentenced to have his head cut off. The Prince confirms the sentence.
  • The hitch: Monaco has neither a guillotine nor an executioner.
  • The ministers ask the French Government to lend a machine and an expert. The cost: 16,000 francs. The Prince says the wretch is not worth the money; it would be more than two francs a head on the whole population and might cause a riot.
  • They then ask the King of Italy, a "brother monarch" (France is a republic with "no proper respect for kings"). The cost: 12,000 francs, including travel. Still too much.
  • The General asks the soldiers to do it. They refuse: "we don't know how to do it; it is not a thing we have been taught."
  • After a Commission, a Committee and a Sub-Committee, the death sentence is changed to imprisonment for life. This lets the Prince show mercy, and it is cheaper.

Summary, Part 2: The Prisoner Who Would Not Leave

  • There is no proper prison, so the man is kept in a small lock-up. A guard watches him and fetches his food from the palace kitchen.
  • After a year the Prince sees the cost: more than 600 francs a year. The man is young and healthy and might live fifty years.
  • The ministers dismiss the guard, hoping the man will run away ("let him run away, and be hanged to him!").
  • Instead, the prisoner walks to the palace kitchen at dinner-time, fetches his own food, goes back and shuts the door on himself.
  • The Minister of Justice tells him to go. He refuses: he has nowhere to go, the sentence has ruined his character, people will turn their backs on him, and he has got out of the way of working. He complains that he has been treated unfairly at every step.
  • The Council offers him a pension of 600 francs a year. He agrees on condition that it is paid regularly.
  • He receives one-third of his annuity in advance and settles just across the frontier, a quarter of an hour away by rail. He buys land, starts market-gardening, draws his pension on time, and even gambles two or three francs at the gaming tables. He lives peaceably and well.

The story ends with irony: it was a good thing he did not commit his crime in a country that does not grudge the expense of cutting off a man's head or keeping him in prison for life.

Central Idea and Themes

"Too Dear!" is a satire. It uses humour to expose serious faults.

  • Money above justice: every decision about the criminal - execution, imprisonment, guard, pension - is made on the basis of cost, not justice.
  • Hypocrisy of the ruler: the Prince lives on a gambling house he knows is harmful, yet plays at being a real king with coronations, levees and courts.
  • Bureaucracy: endless councils, commissions and committees produce a ridiculous result.
  • Irony: the criminal ends up better off than before - free, pensioned, owning land, and gambling at the very gaming house that pays for his pension.
  • Capital punishment: the story quietly raises the question of whether a state that cannot afford to carry out a death sentence should be passing it at all.

[Exam Tip] — "Why could not the king of Monaco execute the criminal?" was a 4-mark question in 2025. Mention: no guillotine or executioner, France's 16,000 francs, Italy's 12,000 francs, the fear of a riot, and the soldiers' refusal.