delicate labor than any perverse canary or escaped macaw had ever needed. Ibsen safely housed in Christiania!—it was the recovery of an important national asset, the resumption, after years of vexation and loss, of the intellectual regalia of Norway.
Ibsen, then—recaptured, though still in a frame of mind which left the captors nervous—was naturally an object of pride. For the benefit of the hundreds of tourists who annually pass through Christiania, it was more than tempting, it was irresistible to point out, in slow advance along Carl Johans Gade, in permanent silence at a table in the Grand Café, “our greatest citizen.” To this species of demonstration Ibsen unconsciously lent himself by his immobility, his regularity of habits, his solemn taciturnity. He had become more like a strange physical object than like a man among men. He was visible broadly and quietly, not conversing, rarely moving, quite isolated and self-contained, a recognized public spectacle, delivered up, as though bound hand and foot, to the kodak-hunter and the maker of “spicy” paragraphs. That Ibsen was never seen to do anything, or heard to say anything, that those who boasted of being intimate with him obviously lied in their teeth—all this prepared him for sacrifice. Christiania is a hot-bed of gossip,
