lives?”[18] He was at this moment forty-four years of age, and less than a year later, he married a second time. At twenty-eight years of age, confined in a fortress pending transfer to Siberia, he cried, “I see I have within me resources of vitality that it will be hard to exhaust.” And in 1856, still in Siberia, but released from prison, and not long married to a widow, Marie Dimitrievna Issaïev by name, he wrote: “Now things are different from what they used to be! So much more reflection, effort and energy enters into my work. Can it be that after struggling so resolutely and courageously for six long years I am incapable of earning enough money to support my wife and myself? Impossible! Nobody knows yet the worth of my powers or the extent of my talent, and this is what I chiefly count on!” But, alas! he has to struggle against other ills than poverty. “My work is done in care and suffering, and I am always at high nervous tension. When I do too much, I become physically ill.”--“Of late I’ve been working literally day and night, in spite of my attacks.” And again: “These attacks will make an end of me: after one, it takes me four days to straighten out my thoughts.” Dostoevsky was never reticent concerning his epilepsy; his attacks of the _falling sickness_ were, alas! all too frequent not to have been witnessed at times by some of his intimates, aye, and by strangers too. Strakhov describes one of these fits in his _Reminiscences_, unconscious, as the sufferer himself was, that there could be the slightest shame attached to the epileptic condition, or that it implied any moral or intellectual “inferiority” apart from the resultant hindrances to work. Even to correspondents of the other sex who were personally unknown to him and whom he was addressing for the first time, he would apologize for his delay in writing, with the naïve and simple remark: “I have just had three of my epileptic fits, uncommonly violent and in rapid succession. But after the attacks, for two or three days I was unable to work, write, or even read, because I am a wreck, body and soul. So now I’ve told you, and I ask your forgiveness for leaving you so long without a reply.” This disease, from which he suffered even before Siberia, grew worse during his imprisonment; it abated but very little during an occasional stay abroad, renewing its force as soon as he returned home. Sometimes the interval between the attacks is longer, but this only augments their violence. “When the fits are infrequent and one suddenly comes over me, I am subject to blackest melancholy. I am reduced to despair. Formerly (he was fifty when he wrote this) this mood lasted three days after the attack, nowadays, a week or more.”