The foppish juryman

A small, foppishly dressed, stout juryman who tells the frame story's longest tale: at twenty-two or twenty-three, madly in love with his fiancee Natasha, he let a lawyer friend talk him into writing and mailing a letter breaking off the engagement, purely to win an argument about whether rhetoric can override settled conviction -- and suffered real despair before learning the letter's address had been deliberately garbled so it would never arrive.