Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/72

Despite the fact that Strindberg loves and admires this invisible magician, with whom he is connected only through correspondence, in every letter he presents him with proofs of his antipathy for theosophy, and when Magus begins to make use of elevated language and tries to tyrannize him, as if Strindberg were a lunatic, and orders the poet to read Mme. Blavatsky^[1], the self-conscious artist within Strindberg assumes such proportions that he becomes a head taller than the magician, and Strindberg declares proudly that he does not need any Blavatsky and that nobody has anything to teach him. When the magian still threatens, he is warned not to meddle with Strindberg’s fate which “is in the keeping of the hand of Providence which always has guided me.”

At the same time that he so powerfully beat back the attack of the magian against his spiritual liberty, he secretly suffered mental torments of the worst kind, believing himself to be in continual danger of his life, pursued by his former friend the Pole.

At this time Strindberg had taken up his abode in the old Catholic Hotel Orfila in rue d’Assas, and I, not knowing of his presence, had settled down in Hotel des Americains in rue de l’Abbe de l’Epee, on the other side of the southernmost part of the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Strindberg had resided earlier.

From mutual friends I learned that Strindberg dwelled in the Quartier de Montparnasse, but that he had begged to be excused from social intercourse on account of his