And then there were my two uncles, Uncle Jacob and Uncle Julius--my mother's brother Jacob and my father's brother Julius, who had both become Frenchmen long ago and lived in Paris. Uncle Jacob often came for a few weeks or more at a time. He was small and broad-shouldered and good-looking. Everybody was fond of Uncle Jacob; all the ladies wanted to be asked to the house when Uncle Jacob came. He had a wife and four children in Paris. But I had pieced together from the conversation of the grown-up people that Aunt Victorine was his wife and yet not his wife. Grandmother would have nothing to do with her. And Uncle Jacob had gone all the way to the Pope in Rome and asked for her to remain his wife. But the Pope had said No. Why? Because Aunt Victorine had had another husband before, who had been cruel to her and beaten her, and the man came sometimes, when Uncle was away, and took her furniture away from her. It was incomprehensible that he should be allowed to, and that the Pope would do nothing to prevent it, for after all she was a Catholic.
Uncle Jacob had a peculiar expression about his mouth when he smiled. There was a certain charm about everything he said and did, but his smile was sad. He had acted thoughtlessly, they said, and was not happy. One morning, while he was visiting Father and Mother and was lying asleep in the big room, there was a great commotion in the house; a messenger was sent for the doctor and the word morphia was spoken. He was ill, but was very soon well again. When he asked his sister next day: "What has become of my case of pistols?" she replied with a grave face: "I have taken it and I shall keep it."
I had not thought as a boy that I should ever see Uncle Jacob's wife and children. And yet it so happened that I did. Many years afterwards, when I was a young man and went to Paris, after my uncle's death, I sought out Victorine and her children. I wished to bring her personally the monthly allowance that her relatives used to send her from Denmark. I found her prematurely old, humbled by poverty, worn out by privation. How was it possible that she should be so badly off? Did she not receive the help that was sent from Copenhagen every month to uncle's best friend, M. Fontane, in the Rue Vivienne? Alas, no! M. Fontane gave her a little assistance once in a while, and at other times sent her and her children away with hard words.
It turned out that M. Fontane had swindled her, and had himself kept the money that had been sent for years to the widow of his best friend. He was a tall, handsome man, with a large business. No one would have believed that a scoundrel could have looked as he did. He was eventually compelled to make the money good. And when the cousin from Denmark rang after that at his French relatives' door, he was immediately hung round, like a Christmas tree, with little boys and one small girl, who jumped up and wound their arms round his neck, and would not let him go.
[BOYHOOD'S YEARS]
Our House--Its Inmates--My Paternal Grandfather--My Maternal Grandfather--School and Home--Farum--My Instructors--A Foretaste of Life --Contempt for the Masters--My Mother--The Mystery of Life--My First Glimpse of Beauty--The Head Master--Religion--My Standing in School-- Self-esteem--An Instinct for Literature--Private Reading--Heine's Buch der Lieder--A Broken Friendship.
I.
The house belonged to my father's father, and had been in his possession some twenty years. My parents lived on the second floor. It was situated in the busy part of the town, right in the heart of Copenhagen. On the first floor lived a West Indian gentleman who spoke Danish with a foreign accent; sometimes there came to see him a Danish man of French descent, Mr. Lafontaine, who, it was said, was so strong that he could take two rifles and bayonets and hold them out horizontally without bending his arm. I never saw Mr. Lafontaine, much less his marvellous feat of strength, but when I went down the stairs I used to stare hard at the door behind which these wonderful doings went on.
In the basement lived Niels, manservant to the family, who, besides his domestic occupations, found time to develop a talent for business. In all secrecy he carried on a commerce, very considerable under the circumstances, in common watches and in mead, two kinds of wares that in sooth had no connection with each other. The watches had no particular attraction for a little boy, but the mead, which was kept in jars, on a shelf, appealed to me doubly. It was the beverage the old Northmen had loved so much that the dead drank it in Valhalla. It was astonishing that it could still be had. How nice it must be! I was allowed to taste it and it surpassed all my expectations. Sweeter than sugar! More delicious than anything else on earth that I had tasted! But if you drank more than a very small glass of it, you felt sick.
And I profoundly admired the dead warriors for having been able to toss off mead from large drinking-horns and eat fat pork with it. What a choice! And they never had stomach-ache!