Whilst literary Berlin was acclaiming Strindberg as the naturalistic playwright, his mind was centred on the hyperchemical speculations which later on found expression in his Antibarbarus I or the Psychology of Sulphur or All is in All, and in Sylva Sylvarum. Whilst wings of imagination were lifting him to new planes of thought, there was a sudden jerk on the chain which bound him to earth. He fell in love. The ideal woman had again appeared, now in the person of Fräulein Frida Uhl, a young Austrian girl, daughter of Hofrath Friedrich Uhl, in Vienna. They became engaged, and art-loving Berlin was one day surprised to see Strindberg escorting his fiancee to the National Gallery. He was attired in the fashionable apparel of the Berlin dandy. A check suit of a large pattern, a short yellow overcoat, a garish tie, a grotesque walking-stick, and an immaculate silk hat which, according to the account given by Gustaf Uddgren, retained its place with difficulty on the leonine mane, gave him an appearance of unwonted worldliness. They were married in April, 1893, and spent the honeymoon at Gravesend. An injunction had meanwhile been granted against the German edition of The Confession of a Fool, and Strindberg returned to Berlin in order to appear before the Court in the action which followed. The prosecution failed. Strindberg and his wife spent the winter at her father's country place at Armstädten, on the Danube, where he returned to his esoteric studies, and wrote his Antibarbarus. In August, 1894, Strindberg went to Paris. His wife had accompanied him, and left their child in Austria. The tie was now irksome to him; les hautes études and not woman had again become the mistress of his soul. In November he sent his wife back to her parents.
"It was with a feeling of wild joy," he writes, "that I returned from Gare du Nord, where I had left my dear little wife who was going to our child who had fallen ill in a distant country. The sacrifice of my heart was thus made complete." Their last words, "When do we meet again?—Soon," were deceptive; an intuition truly told him that they had parted for ever. He had placed human affection on the altar of truth-seeking, thus practising the motto with which Inferno opens:
Courbe la tête, fier Sicambre!
Adore ce que tu as brûlé,
Brûle ce que tu as adoré!
At the Café de la Régence he sat down at the table where he used to sit with his wife, "the beautiful wardress of my prison who spied on my soul day and night, guessed my secret thoughts, watched the course of my ideas, jealously observed my spirit's striving towards the unknown." He felt free, a sense of mental expansion, of liberated power, a call to reach the arcanum of human knowledge.
In Paris he was now the playwright of the day. The success of Lady Julie and Creditors was followed by a brilliant performance of The Father at Théâtre de l'Œuvre in December. All Paris talked of his originality and of his misogyny which provided a piquant sensation, and a subject for interesting gossip in literary and dramatic circles. He was interviewed and photographed—he was the cher maître of the theatrical manager who expected from him a sensible appreciation of his possibilities for further triumphs on the stage. In Berlin he was the literary lion of the moment. His plays and novels lay in the booksellers' windows in attractive German dress, his portrait was exhibited, his personality was discussed. He was saluted as a leader of a new movement. But he turned his back on all this. Another self was shed; a voice within whispered the old burning "Beyond this"—drove him across the borderland of sanity, and into the chaos of unhuman desires.
He left the café, and returned to his rooms in Quartier Latin. From their hiding-place in his trunk he took six crucibles made of fine porcelain, bought with money which he "had stolen from himself," made up a fierce fire in the stove, and pulled down the blinds for the night's experiment. His theory regarding the composition of sulphur which had met with such merciless ridicule was now to be put to the final test. A packet of pure sulphur and a pair of tongs completed the equipment of the laboratory. The sulphur burnt with infernal flames, and towards the morning he was able to demonstrate that it contained carbon. He believed that he had solved the great problem, overthrown orthodox chemistry, and gained scientific immortality. He had not noticed that the intense heat had burnt his hands, and caused the skin to fall off in flakes, but the pain of undressing in the morning made him conscious of the injury. The joy in the pursuit of the problems which haunted him was, however, greater than the pain, and the experiments were continued night after night. He had proved the existence of carbon in sulphur, now he had to show that it contained hydrogen and oxygen. The burns on his hands became filled with fragments of coke, they were bleeding, and caused him great pain, but he persisted in the work. He avoided his friends, and sought absolute loneliness. Meanwhile he wrote love-letters to his wife, relating to her the wonderful discoveries which he had made. She replied by warnings against such futile and foolish occupations, in which she saw nothing but waste of money. Irritated by her want of sympathy, Strindberg sent her a letter of farewell to wife and child, in which he led her to understand that a love affair had absorbed all his thoughts. She replied by instituting proceedings for divorce.
The charge which he had made against himself was not true, and he was soon the prey of remorse. His injured pride had led him to write a letter which he describes as shameful and unpardonable, and in the loneliness which followed he saw himself as a suicide and assassinator. On Christmas Eve the vision of his deserted wife and child by the Christmas tree caused him to flee from the company which he had sought, and visit café after café, where he failed to find comfort in the usual glass of absinthe. During the night the feeling of being persecuted by an unknown power, bent on preventing his great task, overcame him. He slept badly, and was repeatedly awakened by a cold current of air sweeping across his face. Poverty, his persistent enemy, did hot leave him in peace. He lacked the necessary means to pay for rent and regular meals. His hands were black and swollen through neglect, and symptoms of blood-poisoning in the arms set in. The news of his helplessness and misery spread amongst his countrymen in Paris. He was sought out by a persistent countrywoman who raised a sum of money amongst the Swedes in Paris, and Strindberg was brought to the Hospital of Saint Louis, his cup of humiliation filled to overflowing.
At the hospital he felt imprisoned amongst ghosts, punished by having to live in the midst of people with the faces of the dead and dying, the wrecks of humanity who offended his sense of beauty by appearing without a nose or an eye, with a split lip or a mortifying cheek. Amongst these derelicts Strindberg watched the gentle ministrations of the old sœur de charité. She was kind to him, allowed him little privileges, called him her boy, and he responded by calling her "my mother." "How blissful," he writes, "to say this word mother which had not passed my lips for thirty years. The old woman who belongs to the Order of Saint Augustine, and who wears the costume of the dead because she has never taken part in life, is gentle as self-sacrifice, and teaches us to smile at our pains, as if they were pleasures, for she knows how beneficial suffering can be. Not a reproachful word, no expostulations or sermons." "This nun has played a part in my life," he adds, and, when writing down his Inferno experiences three years later, he sends her thoughts of gratitude for having shown him the path of the cross.
During the months which he spent in the hospital his chemical speculations continued to absorb his interest. He submitted his insufficiently burnt sulphur to an independent analysis which confirmed his demonstration that it contained carbon. The chemist at the hospital encouraged his researches, and Strindberg laid the results before the public in an article which appeared in Le Temps, and brought him requests for further articles on his theories. He left the hospital in February, and spent two months in chemical work during which he became a student at the Sorbonne, and used the analytical laboratory. At the conclusion of his experiments he was satisfied that sulphur is a ternary combination consisting of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
A superstitious faith in signs and warnings had meanwhile developed. A mysterious meaning in the names of the streets and places which he passed made itself known to him—rue Beaurepaire, rue Dieu, Porte Saint-Martin—a gorgeous signboard above a dyeing business, displaying his own initials on a white silver cloud surmounted by a rainbow, became a good omen of the future. The chemist Orfila revealed himself as a kind patron saint to whom he was strangely led, first by finding his chemical treatise in a bookseller's shop, then by discovering his grave in the course of a morning walk in the Montparnasse cemetery, and finally by being attracted to Hotel Orfila—the monasterial guest-house from which women were excluded.