The Queen of Sweden read the book and came to the conclusion that it was injurious to morality and offensive to religion. She was undoubtedly sincere in her condemnation, whilst the majority who joined the hue and cry against Strindberg were but tainted reflections of the purity upon which they prided themselves. This time the author of _The Red Room_ and _The New Kingdom_ had placed himself within reach of the law. Within a fortnight of the publication of _Married_ the book was impounded, and proceedings were instituted against the publisher. But it was not the indecency which was the subject of legal proceedings. It was the sacrilegious handling of Holy Communion in the first story, entitled "The Reward of Virtue," which afforded the opportunity for legal repression. True to the irreverent impulse which owed its origin to the ecclesiastical preparations in the sexton's kitchen, Strindberg had vented his feelings of opposition to the tenets of Christianity in a tasteless sentence. It recorded the commercial value of the wafers and the wine and ridiculed the "insolent fraud" which enabled the priest to foist these articles of commerce on the congregation, as the flesh and blood of the "Agitator" who was executed more than 1800 years ago. The story, which to a great extent was autobiographical, dealt with the alleged evils of chastity in a youth and consequent declination of mental faculties. The problems of puberty, which Wedekind subsequently dramatised with tragic force in _Frühlings Erwachen_, were amongst the painful experiences which Strindberg dwelt upon in his autobiography. In _Married_ the conflict between Nature and virtue is falsely presented. The auxiliary influences of moral and physical culture are ignored. Some stories treat of love and marriage, of the transformation of raptures and idylls into painful struggles for the maintenance of the family, of helpless young men captured in the economic trap of matrimony, of the monotony of daily domestic drudgery which makes fretful wives and impatient husbands out of ardent Romeos and dreamy Juliets. There are squabbles and reconciliations, there are scenes and _intérieurs_ in the comedy of marriage, to which the stories bear witness with little regard for the usual restraint of description. The characters are life-like types of Swedish middle-class society. They have been drawn with a realism which shows them as the pathetic puppets of marital fate, or as the unreflecting fools of sexual idealism. There is the deft touch of Maupassant in the rendering of love's irony, there is the inevitableness of Balzac and--in the "indecencies"--not a little of Boccaccio's mirth of imagination.