He had left his wife and
little son in Copenhagen, but at the beginning of October they joined
him in Rome. The family lived on an income which seems almost incredibly
small, a maximum of 40 scudi a month. But it was a different thing to be
hungry in Christiania and in Rome, and Ibsen makes no complaints. A sort
of blessed languor had fallen upon him after all his afflictions. He
would loll through half his days among the tombs on the Via Latina, or
would loiter for hours and hours along the Appian Way. It took him weeks
to summon energy to visit S. Pietro in Vincoli, although he knew that
Michelangelo's "Moses" was there, and though he was weary with longing
to see it. All the tense chords of Ibsen's nature were loosened. His
soul was recovering, through a long and blissful convalescence, from the
aching maladies of its youth.
He took some part in the society of those Scandinavian writers, painters
and sculptors who gathered in Rome through the years of their distress.
But only one of them attracted him strongly, the young Swedish lyrical
poet, Count Carl Snoilsky, then the hope and already even the glory of
his country.
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