In one of his letters to Georg Brandes he has noted, with that
clairvoyance which marks some of his utterances about himself, the
"full-blooded egotism" which developed in him during his last year of
mental and moral starvation at Grimstad. Through the whole series of his
satiric dramas we see the little narrow-minded borough, with its
ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, its
intolerable laws and ordinances, modified here and there, expanded
sometimes, modernized and brought up to date, but always recurrent in
the poet's memory. To the last, the images and the rebellions which were
burned into his soul at Grimstad were presented over and over again to
his readers.

But the necessity of facing the examination at Christiania now presented
itself. He was so busily engaged in the shop that he had, as he says, to
steal his hours for study. He still inhabited the upper room, which he
calls a garret; it would not seem that the alteration in his status,
assistant now and no longer apprentice, had increased his social
conveniences. He was still the over-worked apothecary, pounding drugs
with a pestle and mortar from morning till night. Someone has pointed
out the odd circumstance that almost every scene in the drama of
_Catilina_ takes place in the dark. This was the unconscious result of
the fact that all the attention which the future realist could give to
the story had to be given in the night hours. When he emerged from the
garret, it was to read Latin with a candidate in theology, a Mr. Monrad,
brother of the afterwards famous professor. By a remarkable chance, the
subject given by the University for examination was the Conspiracy of
Catiline, to be studied in the history of Sallust and the oration of
Cicero.