over very briefly. In 1834 he married; his wife was subject to attacks of insanity, and all his later life was saddened by the struggle with misfortune and poverty. In 1840 he was called to a newly founded professorship of Slavic literature at the Collège de France. His lectures as holder of this chair are the only literary work of great importance that he produced during this last period of his life. Soon after the completion of Pan Tadeusz he had become absorbed by a religious mysticism that caused him to turn entirely aside from poetry. In 1841 he fell under the influence of Andrzej Towianski, a teacher who announced himself as the prophet of a new religion. His acceptance and promulgation of a doctrine which was pronounced heretical by the Catholic Church, and which inculcated a religious reverence for Napoleonic traditions, made it impossible for the French government to retain his services in a government institution, and in 1844 he was deprived of his professorship. The accession to power of Napoleon III. filled him with new hopes. In 1855 he journeyed to Constantinople, wishing to aid in the war against Russia, and there he died of the cholera. His remains, first laid to rest in Paris, were transferred in 1890 to the cathedral at Cracow.[1]
Pan Tadeusz was not the result of a momentary inspiration, but grew gradually under the author's hand. On December 8, 1832, he wrote to a friend: "I am now at work on a poem of life among the gentry, in the style of Hermann and Dorothea. I have already
- ↑ English readers are fortunate in possessing an excellent account of the life and writings of Mickiewicz in the work by Miss Monica M. Gardner, Adam Mickiewicz, the National Poet of Poland (London and New York, 1911).
