He makes his attic into a temple of worship, with azaleas, geraniums and roses, and prepares an altar for the adoration of his Madonna with the child. He places her portrait in a semicircle of flower-pots, with the lamplight full on it, and passes the evenings with blinds drawn down in the Holy of Holies. But the strain becomes unbearable. Another evening he is found in the midst of dissolute friends, a partaker in an orgy of youthful blasphemy and desecration of love. Amidst bacchanalian invocation of the satanic, he delivers himself of a rhapsody of insults against the adored woman, dissects her in anatomical terms and coarse allusions, and ends the day by sacrificing his woman-worship on the polluted altar of Aphrodite Pandemos. He wants to flee from temptation, and decides to quit Stockholm for Paris. Embarked upon a cargo steamer bound for Havre, after a touching farewell from his two friends, duty's journey is found to be unendurable. He is tormented with loneliness, overcome by the thought of the dreary voyage and the cruel separation from the beloved. A wild desire to escape from the moving prison, to swim to the shore, seizes him. An opportunity for less dramatic flight offers itself; the pilot cutter is about to leave the steamer for the shore. Strindberg impetuously begs the captain to put him ashore, and the latter, suspecting the sanity of the traveller, allows him and his luggage to depart in the cutter. Once ashore and in the quiet seaside place where, the spring before, he had spent happy hours with her the situation becomes awkward. He is ashamed of his weakness; how is his conduct to be explained? After engaging a room at the hotel he wanders into the forest and runs amuck among the fir trees and the tender associations of the past, the tears raining down his cheeks, his heart in a turmoil of conflicting emotions. He concludes that he must either die or go out of his mind, and chooses a wilfully contracted pneumonia as the most suitable road to extinction. He undresses by the shore, throws himself into the cold water and swims out into the open sea. After a struggle with the waves, he returns exhausted. Beckoning Fate to do her worst, he then climbs an aider tree in a state of perfect nudity. The icy October gale responds, and, when he descends shivering, he is satisfied with the first part of the expiatory act. Back at the hotel he sends a telegram to the Baron, informing his friends of his illness, goes to bed, and drains a cup of poison in the form of an overdose of the sleeping-draught supplied by the local chemist. The next morning brings the Baron and the anxious Baroness, and a return of rude health which neither gale nor poison could shake.