Marys of his life
All the women of his life, there were
five if them, had just one name Mary: Maria Babska ,
Maria
Radziejowska , Maria Romanowska ,
Maria
Keller , Maria Szetkiewicz. One of them
proposed to him, another was madly in love with him eventhough
she was thirty years younger, and another accused him of
impotence.
Comune in America
When he was staying in America
(1876-78), he tried, together with some friends to estabilish a
rural commune in Ananeim.
Schooling and readings out of school
He was always attracted to litterature
wchich was far beyond the normal school curiculmm of that time.
He would read Voltaire, Scott, Dumas or Shakespeare and Homer. As
far as the grades on his certificates are concerned,
„pass" was a frequent thing. But there were two exeptions:
mother tongue and history, at which he was „outstanding".
A number of times he had to change the seondary school for
reasons still unknown. In the first school he stayed for four
years, in the second - two, in the third - only one. After having
abandoned it too, he left for one year where he prapared himself
for the terminal examinaton. He passed it at the age of 20.
Anything but six weeks in one place
During preparations for one marriage a
problem appeared. Sienkiewicz could not obtain a certain
important paper, the issuing of which was at the discretion of
the local parish. The condition to fulfil was spending six weeks
in one place, which turned out completely impossible for him,
since his life was one big journey.
Real or fictions
When the novel „With fire and
sword" came out in a Warsaw newspaper „The Word", the
readers were so much touched by the events of the book that they
would write letters to Sienkiewicz suggesting the continuations
of them. They also could not believe that all the hereos were
entirely fictitions and they would go on looking for their graves
on the sites described by the author.