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chemical experiments. It was hinted that he was not in his right mind and that on this account it was advisable to respect his refusal to receive callers. Where he kept himself nobody knew, since the day when he had had an attack of nerves because dinner had been served for him in the yard of Mme. Charlotte’s Crémerie in rue de la grande Chaumière, the little restaurant of the artists where he surely was surrounded by sincere friends.

One day the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch came and related that he had, run across Strindberg who had commenced to feel rather lonesome and shown himself desirous of his company. In order to facilitate his approach. Munch had proposed to paint Strindberg’s picture, and Strindberg had been posing for him a couple of hours now and then.

But Strindberg had a fixed idea. Ever since he had heard Schumann’s Aufschwung played one afternoon in the neighborhood of Hotel Orfila, he had been fully convinced that Przybyszewski had arrived in Paris by way of Vienna-Berlin in order to murder him. The reason for the Pole’s mania for murder was that his wife had been intimate with Strindberg only a very short time before she had met the Pole.

Without being initiated into the details, anyone will readily see that on such grounds Stachu scarcely had a reason for conjuring up a hatred of Strindberg so glowing as to inspire him with the idea of murder. Munch and myself knew very well that there was another man on whom Stachu had lavished all his hatred and whom he had dealt a severe blow by describing him