Adam Mickiewicz is appointed professor of Latin literature at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in 1839.

He had arrived in France in 1832 as a Polish refugee in Paris, where his life had for some time been spent in poverty and unhappiness.

He had married a Polish lady, Celina Szymanowska (her parents came from Jewish Frankist families), who has become mentally ill.

Marital discord and Celina's mental illness had driven Mickiewicz to attempt suicide on December 17 or 18, 1838, by jumping out a window.

Mickiewicz’s masterpiece, the great epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1834), describes the life of the Polish gentry in the early nineteenth century through a fictional account of the feud between two families of Polish nobles.

The poem conveys perfectly the ethos of an archaic society in which the ideals of chivalry are still alive and shows the effect of the Napoleonic myth on the minds of Poles for whom the French emperor and the Polish troops under his command represented the only hope for liberation from Russian rule.