Legends: Autobiographical Sketches

CONTENTS
Hunted by the furies, I found myself finally in December 1896 fixed fast in the little university town Lund, in Sweden. A conglomeration of small houses round a cathedral, a palace-like university building and a library, forming an oasis of civilisation in the great southern Swedish plain. I must admire the refinement of cruelty which has chosen this place as my prison. The University of Lund is much prized by the natives of Schonen, but for a man from the north like myself the fact that one stays here is a sign that one has come to an inclined plane and is rolling down. Moreover, for me who am well advanced in the forties, have been a married man for twenty years and am accustomed to a regular family life, it is a humiliation to be relegated to intercourse with students, bachelors who are given to a life of riot and carousing, and who are all more or less in ill odour with the fatherly authorities of the university because of their radical way of thinking.
Of the same age, and formerly a companion of the professors, who now no longer tolerate me, I am compelled to find my friends among the students, and so to take upon myself the rôle of an enemy of the seniors and of the social circles of solid respectability. Come down, indeed! That is just the right word, and why? Because I scorned to submit myself to the laws of social life and domestic slavery. I have regarded the conflict for the upholding of my personality as a sacred duty, quite irrespective of the fact of its being a good or bad one.
Excommunicated, regarded with suspicion, denounced by fathers and mothers as a corrupter of youth, I am placed in a situation which reminds one of a snake in an ant-heap, all the more as I cannot leave the town through pecuniary embarrassment.
Pecuniary embarrassment! That has now been my lot for three years, and I cannot explain how all my resources were dried up, as soon as my profits were exhausted. Four-and-twenty dramas of my composing are now laid up in a corner, and not a single one performed any more; an equal number of novels and tales, and not one in a second edition. All attempts to borrow a loan have failed and continue to fail. After I had sold all that I possessed, need compelled me at last to sell the letters which I had received in the course of years, i.e. other people's property.