This constant condition of poverty seems to me so clearly to depend upon some special purpose of Providence that I finally endure it willingly as a part of my penance and do not try to resist it any more. As regards myself, I want of means signifies nothing to me as an independent author, but it is disgraceful not to have the wherewithal to support my children. Very well! I make up my mind to bear the disgrace though it involve pains like hell. I will not yield to the temptation to pay for false honour with my life. Prepared for anything, I endure resolutely to the uttermost the most extraordinary humiliations and observe how my expiatory pangs commence. Well-educated youths of good family treat me one night to a serenade of caterwauling in my corridor. I take it as something I have deserved without disturbing myself. I try to hire a furnished lodging. The landlord refuses with transparent excuses, and the refusal is flung in my face. I pay visits and am not received. These are mere trifles. But what really wounds me is the sublime irony shown in the unconscious behaviour of my young friends when they try to encourage me by praising my literary works, "so fruitful in liberating ideas, etc." And this to me, who have just flung these so-called ideas on the dust-heap, so that those who entertain these views are now my opponents! I am at war with my former self, and while I oppose my friends and those once of the same mind with me, I lay myself prostrate in the dust. This is irony indeed; and as a dramatist I must admire the composition of this tragi-comedy. In truth, the scenes are well-arranged. Meanwhile people, taking into consideration the way in which old and new views become entangled with each other in a period of transition, do not reckon too rigidly with a veteran like myself. They do not prick up their ears so solemnly at my arguments, but rather ask after novelties in the world of ideas. I open for them the vestibule to the temple of Isis, and say, by way of preliminary, that occultism is going to be the vogue. Then they rage, and cut me down with the same weapons which during twenty years I have been forging against superstition and mysticism. Since these debates always take place in garden-restaurants to the accompaniment of wine-drinking, one avoids violent arguments, and I confine myself to relating facts and real occurrences, assuming the mask of an enlightened sceptic. It can certainly not be said that people are opposed to everything new--quite the contrary; but they become conservative as regards ideals which have been won by hard fighting and which one is not inclined to desert. Still less are they disposed to abjure a faith which has been purchased by a baptism of blood. It falls to my share to strike out a path between naturalism and supernaturalism, by expounding the latter as a development of the former.