Carl Michael Bellmanthe BonfireESFP

In 1794, Carl Michael Bellman, Sweden's best-loved songwriter, was locked in a room in the guard wing of the royal palace in Stockholm. He was 54, and he owed money he could not pay. By one account, when he sang at the barred window, passers-by and soldiers of the guard stopped below to listen.

It was a strange place to find him. For eighteen years he had held a court post, as secretary of the national number lottery, a gift from King Gustav III.

The debt had been coming all his life. He was born in Stockholm on 4 February 1740. At 23 he already owed so much that he fled across the border to Norway. Money ran through his hands for the next thirty years.

And through all of it, he sang. He did not just write his songs. He performed them, playing the cittern and putting on a different voice for every character. The king called him Il signor improvisatore, the master improviser. His Fredman's Epistles, songs of Stockholm's taverns, drinkers and lovers, are still sung in Sweden.

When Gustav III seized power in 1772, Bellman's toast to the king, Gustafs skål, became the rallying song of the coup. Royal favor followed, and in 1776 the lottery post and a steady salary.

He had everything except a way of handling money. He spent his days making other people happy and his evenings in company, and the accounts never got their hour. Bonfires will know the drawer where the unopened letters go.

In 1792 the king was assassinated. Bellman's patron was gone, and by 1793 he was in money trouble again. In 1794 a creditor had him arrested.

Look at what he did in the cell. He wrote songs, because that is what he did in every room he had ever been in, and a cell is a room. And for the first time he began to write down his own life.

He wrote it the only way he knew, with jokes. He remembered his mother as beautiful as the day, endlessly kind and good to everyone. Then he added a line about her children.

Twenty-one births, and fifteen children who lived. He made his family's hard times into a punchline, writing from a debtors' cell. It is the Bonfire way of telling the truth: shaped, timed, and funny enough to bear.

After a time, friends paid the debt and he walked out. The weeks inside had ruined what was left of his health. He died on 11 February 1795, a week after his 55th birthday, leaving his wife, Lovisa, with their young sons. He was buried in the Klara churchyard without a gravestone.

Everyone had wanted Bellman at the table: the king, the taverns, the soldiers under the window. Nobody, least of all Bellman, had been watching the bill.