"Have you made a name, sir? No! Have you distinguished yourself in any way? No!"
"The Academy has praised these verses."
"Which Academy? The Academy of Sciences? The one which publishes all that stuff about flints?"
"About flints?"
"Yes, you know the Academy of Sciences! Close to the Museum, near the river. Well, then!"
"Oh, no, Mr. Smith! The Swedish Academy, in the Exchange...."
"I see! The one with the tallow candles! Never mind; no man on earth can tell what purpose it serves! No, my dear sir, the essential thing is to have a name, a name like Tegnér, like Ohrenschlägel, like—Yes! Our country has many great poets, but I can't remember them just at the moment; but a name is necessary. Mr. Falk? H'm! Who knows Mr. Falk? I don't, and I know many great poets. As I recently said to my friend Ibsen: 'Now just you listen to me, Ibsen'—I call him Ibsen, quite plainly—'just you listen to me, write something for my magazine. I'll pay you whatever you ask!' He wrote—I paid—but I got my money back."
The annihilated young man longed to sink through the chinks in the floor when he realized that he was standing before a person who called Ibsen quite plainly "Ibsen." He longed to recover his manuscript, and go his way, as the other young man had done, away, far away, until he came to running water. Smith guessed it.
"Well, I've no doubt you can write Swedish, sir. And you know our literature better than I do. Good! I have an idea. I am told of great, beautiful, spiritual writers who lived in the past, let's say in the reign of Gustav Eriksson and his daughter Christina. Isn't that so?"
"Gustavus Adolfus."