e distracted exiles. In Paris
also, in the course of about fourteen months (1832-34), he wrote _Pan
Tadeusz,_ his greatest poem--and (with insignificant exceptions) his last.

The story of Mickiewicz's closing years may be passed over very briefly.
In 1834 he married; his wife was subject to attacks of insanity, and all
his later life was saddened by the struggle with misfortune and poverty.
In 1840 he was called to a newly founded professorship of Slavic
literature at the College de France. His lectures as holder of this chair
are the only literary work of great importance that he produced during
this last period of his life. Soon after the completion of _Pan Tadeusz_
he had become absorbed by a religious mysticism that caused him to turn
entirely aside from poetry. In 1841 he fell under the influence of Andrzej
Towianski, a teacher who announced himself as the prophet of a new
religion. His acceptance and promulgation of a doctrine which was
pronounced heretical by the Catholic Church, and which inculcated a
religious reverence for Napoleonic traditions, made it impossible for the
French government to retain his services in a government institution, and
in 1844 he was deprived of his professorship. The accession to power of
Napoleon III. filled him with new hopes. In 1855 he journeyed to
Constantinople, wishing to aid in the war against Russia, and there he
died of the cholera. His remains, first laid to rest in Paris, were
transferred in 1890 to the cathedral at Cracow.(4)

_Pan Tadeusz_ was not the result of a momentary inspiration, but grew
gradually under the author's hand. On December 8, 1832, he wrote to a
friend: "I am now at work on a poem of life among the gentry, in the style
of _Hermann and Dorothea_. I have already jotted down a thousand verses."
He had evidently planned a village idyl of no great length, probably based
on the love of Thaddeus and Zosia. In a draft of the first book that is
still preserved, Thaddeus sees on the wall a picture of Joseph Poniatowski
at the battle of Leipzig (October 19, 1813), "riding a mettled steed" but
"stricken with a mortal wound." Thus the action of the poem could not have
taken place earlier than 1814. Later, Mickiewicz threw back the time of
his action to the autumn of 1811 and the spring of 1812; thus, by giving
his poem a political background in the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, he
transformed his village idyl into a national epic. The Monk Robak, or
Jacek Soplic