During the last years of his life, Seurat's drawings veered toward abstraction—as in these serpentine chair backs and space-alien coiffeurs—and photographic dissolve. Meanwhile, the social tensions implicit in his drawings intensified, in the streets of Paris, amid a wave of violent strikes and bombings. In 1894, Félix Fénéon was arrested by the Parisian police for possession of bomb-making materials, including 11 detonators, and he translated Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey in his jail cell while awaiting trial. (He also remains the prime suspect in the unsolved bombing of the Foyot restaurant that spring.) Cleared of all charges—the jury fell for his charm and his absurd claim that his father had found the explosives in the street—he was fired from the War Office and worked for newspapers instead. For much of 1906, Fénéon filled the columns of Le Matin with brilliant miniature news stories like this: "On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. André, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more." These fragmented "novels in three lines," according to Luc Sante, enlisted "the detachment and objectivity of science" and "partook of the same essence as the pointillists' adamantine dots." At the time of the trial, Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé told the press that Fénéon's real detonators were his words.