After his resignation was actually accepted, he spent some time at the court of Madame de Staël, and made the acquaintance of her international circle of friends. The year 1813, the year of Prussia's declaration of war against France, was the most trying of all for the unfortunate young Franco-German. His heart was divided; he desired the fall of Napoleon because he hated despotism, but at the same time he felt every humiliation which befell the French troops during their retreat from Russia, and every insulting word spoken of the Emperor, as if the misfortune had happened, the insult been offered, to himself. And with this very natural feeling his German associates showed no forbearance. He often cried despairingly: "No, the times have no sword for me." "Action and inaction," he writes in May 1813, "are equally painful to me." This was the mood which produced his most notable work, _Peter Schlemihl_. The great historical events which harrowed his feelings made him intellectually productive; the summer of 1813 was a turning-point in his life. "I had no longer a country," he says, "or as yet no country." And so the man without a country writes the tale of the man without a shadow. In spite of its intangibility, a man's shadow is, like his country, like his home, one of his natural possessions, a thing which belongs to him from his birth, which is, as it were, part of him. In ordinary circumstances it is regarded as so entirely natural that a man should have a country, that it is hardly reckoned as a special possession, but is, like his shadow, taken as a matter of course. Chamisso gave expression to all his sadness, to the great sorrow of his life, in his daringly imagined fable. And strangely enough, he not only figuratively gave in it the essence of all his past experiences, but also prophetically imaged his future, his voyage round the world and his scientific labours. After Schlemihl has escaped from the temptations of the devil, he accidentally comes into possession of the seven-leagued boots, which take him to every country in the world, and enable him to pursue his favourite study to the greatest advantage. Schlemihl himself says: "My future suddenly showed itself clearly to the eyes of my soul. Banished from human society by the misdemeanours of my youth, I was thrown into the arms of Nature, whom I had always loved. The earth was given to me as a rich garden, study as the directing influence and strength of my life, knowledge as its aim." The originality of its plot and the remarkable clearness of its style (this last a characteristic of all Chamisso's writing, and evidently his intellectual inheritance as a Frenchman) made _Peter Schlemihl_ an extraordinary success. It was translated into nearly every language. Ten years after its publication a new kind of lamp, which cast no shadow, was named the Schlemihl lamp.