time, but before that his easily fired
imagination had given him a thorough shake-up, which could only hasten
the crisis which seemed to be approaching. After a trip to Bruenn, where
Strindberg wrote his scientific work _Antibarbarus_, the couple arrived
in November at the home of Frida Uhl's grandparents in the little
village of Dornach, by the Upper Danube; here the wanderings of 1893 at
last came to an end. For a few months comparative peace reigned in the
artists' little home, but the birth of a daughter, Kerstin, in May,
brought this tranquillity to a sudden end. Strindberg, who had lived in
a state of nervous depression since the 1880's, felt himself put on one
side by the child, and felt ill at ease in an environment of, as he put
it in the autobiographical _The Quarantine Master_, 'articles of food,
excrements, wet-nurses treated like milch-cows, cooks and decaying
vegetables.' He longed for cleanliness and peace, and in letters to
an artist friend he spoke of entering a monastery. He even thought of
founding one himself in the Ardennes and drew up detailed schemes for
rules, dress, and food. The longing to get away and common interests
with his Parisian friend (a musician named Leopold Littmansson)
attracted Strindberg to Paris, where he settled down in the beginning of
the autumn 1894. His wife joined him, but left again at the close of the
autumn. In reality Strindberg was at this time almost impossible to live
with. Persecution mania and hallucinations took possession of him and
his morbid suspicions knew no bounds. In spite of this he was half
conscious that there was something wrong with his mental faculties, and
in the beginning of 1895, assisted by the Swedish Minister, he went by
his own consent to the St. Louis Hospital in Paris. During his chemical
experiments, in which among other things he tried to produce gold, he
had burnt his hands, so that he had to seek medical attention on that
account also. He wrote about this in a letter:

'I am going to hospital because I am ill, because my doctor has sent me
there, and because I need to be looked after like a child, because I
am ruined.... And it torments me and grieves me, my nervous system is
rotten, paralytic, hysterical....'

Never before had Strindberg lived in such distress as at this period,
both physically and mentally. With shattered nerves, sometimes over
the verge of insanity, without any means of existence other than what
friends managed to s