A week later a sniper in a garret opposite the prison fired a shot into a cell, wounding the man next to Galois. Galois was convinced that the bullet was intended for himself and that there was a government plot to assassinate him. The fear of political persecution terrorized him, and the isolation from his friends and family and rejection of his mathematical ideas plunged him into a state of depression. In a bout of drunken delirium he tried to stab himself to death, but his fellow republicans managed to restrain and disarm him.
