In the evening my good mother-in-law receives me with a manner that is enigmatic. She casts a searching look at me sideways, as though she wished to ascertain what sort of impression the stupendous occurrence had made on me. "You have heard it?" she asks.
"Yes, it is strange—a clap of thunder in November." She at any rate no longer considers me damned.
[XI]
HELL LET LOOSE
Meanwhile, in order to entirely bewilder me regarding the real nature of my illness, a current number of L'Événement contains the following notice:
"The unhappy Strindberg, who brought his misogyny to Paris, was quickly compelled to take himself off. Since then his partisans are dumb and confounded before the feminist flag. They do not wish to undergo the fate of Orpheus, whose head was torn off by the Thracian Bacchanals."
So they actually did lay a plot against me in the Rue de la Clef, and the morbid symptoms from which I still suffer are the result of that murderous attempt. Oh, these women! Certainly my articles on the feminist pictures of my Danish friend were not calculated to please them. But, at any rate, here is a fact, a tangible occurrence which dissipates my terrible doubts regarding my mental soundness.