their home as a friend. Love quickly flared up between Siri von
Essen-Wrangel and Strlndberg. She obtained a divorce from her
husband and married Strindberg. Baron von Wrangel shortly
afterwards married again, a cousin of Siri von Essen. Knowing these
matrimonial complications we understand how Strindberg must have
felt when, on the point of leaving for Heligoland to marry Frida
Uhl, he met his former wife's (Siri von Essen) first husband, Baron
Wrangel, on Lehrter Station in Berlin, and found that, like
Strindberg himself, he was on a lover's errand. Knowing all this we
need not be surprised at the extremely complicated matrimonial
relations in _The Road to Damascus_, where, for example, for the
sake of THE STRANGER, THE DOCTOR obtains a divorce from THE LADY in
order to marry THE STRANGER'S first wife. In addition to Baron
Wrangel a doctor in the town of Ystad, in the south of Sweden--Dr.
Eliasson who attended Strindberg during his most difficult period--
has stood as a model for THE DOCTOR. We note in particular that the
description of the doctor's house enclosing a courtyard on three
sides, tallies with a type of building which is characteristic of
the south of Sweden. When THE DOCTOR ruthlessly explains to THE
STRANGER that the asylum, 'The Good Help,' was not a hospital but a
lunatic asylum, he expresses Strindberg's own misgivings that the
St. Louis Hospital, of which, as mentioned above, Strindberg was
an inmate in the beginning of the year 1895, was really to be
regarded as a lunatic asylum.

Even minor characters, such as CAESAR and THE BEGGAR have their
counterparts in real life, even though in the main they are
fantastic creations of his imagination. The guardian of his
daughter, Kerstin, a relative of Frida Uhl's, was called Dr. Caesar
R. v. Weyr. Regarding THE BEGGAR it may be enough to quote