Marie Grubbe, a Lady of the Seventeenth Century

by J. P. Jacobsen

This was true at first, but her imagination tired of flying unceasingly toward the same goal like an imprisoned bee buzzing against the window-pane, and all other faculties of her soul wearied too. As a fair and noble edifice in the hands of barbarians is laid waste and spoiled, the bold spires made into squat cupolas, the delicate, lace-like ornaments broken bit by bit, and the wealth of pictures hidden under layer upon layer of deadening whitewash, so was Marie Grubbe laid waste and spoiled in those sixteen years.

Erik Grubbe, her father, was old and decrepit, and age seemed to intensify all his worst traits, just as it sharpened his features and made them more repulsive. He was grouchy and perverse, childishly obstinate, quick to anger, extremely suspicious, sly, dishonest, and stingy. In his later days he always had the name of God on his lips, especially when the harvest was poor or the cattle were sick, and he would address the Lord with a host of cringing, fawning names of his own invention. It was impossible that Marie should either love or respect him, and besides she had a particular grudge against him, because he had persuaded her to marry Palle Dyre by dint of promises that were never fulfilled and by threats of disinheriting her, turning her out of Tjele, and withdrawing all support from her. In fact, her chief motive for the change had been her hope of making herself independent of the paternal authority, though this hope was frustrated; for Palle Dyre and Erik Grubbe had agreed to work the farms of Tjele and Nörbæk—which latter was given Marie as a dower on certain conditions—together, and as Tjele was the larger of the two, and Erik Grubbe no longer had the strength to look after it, Marie and her husband spent more time under her father’s roof than under their own.

Palle Dyre was the son of Colonel Clavs Dyre of Sandvig and Krogsdal, later of Vinge, and his wife Edele Pallesdaughter Rodtsteen. He was a thickset, shortnecked little man, brisk in all his motions and with a rather forceful face, which, however, was somewhat marred by a hemorrhage in the lungs that had affected his right cheek.

Marie despised him. He was as stingy and greedy as Erik Grubbe himself. Yet he was really a man of some ability, sensible, energetic, and courageous, but he simply lacked any sense of honor whatever. He would cheat and lie whenever he had a chance, and was never in the least abashed when found out. He would allow himself to be abused like a dog and never answer back, if silence could bring him a penny’s profit. Whenever a relative or friend commissioned him to buy or sell anything or entrusted any other business to him, he would turn the matter to his own advantage without the slightest scruple. Though his marriage had been in the main a bargain, he was not without a sense of pride in winning the divorced wife of the Viceroy; but this did not prevent him from treating her and speaking to her in a manner that might have seemed incompatible with such a feeling. Not that he was grossly rude or violent—by no means. He simply belonged to the class of people who are so secure in their own sense of normal and irreproachable mediocrity that they cannot refrain from asserting their superiority over the less fortunate and naïvely setting themselves up as models. As for Marie, she was, of course, far from unassailable; her divorce from Ulrik Frederik and her squandering of her mother’s fortune were but too patent irregularities.

This was the man who became the third person in their life at Tjele. Not one trait in him gave grounds for hope that he would add to it any bit of brightness or comfort. Nor did he. Endless quarrelling and bickering, mutual sullenness and fault-finding, were all that the passing days brought in their train.

Marie was blunted by it. Whatever had been delicate and flowerlike in her nature, all the fair and fragrant growth which heretofore had entwined her life as with luxurious though fantastic and even bizarre arabesques, withered and died the death. Coarseness in thought as in speech, a low and slavish doubt of everything great and noble, and a shameless self-scorn were the effect of these sixteen years at Tjele. And yet another thing: she developed a thick-blooded sensuousness, a hankering for the good things of life, a lusty appetite for food and drink, for soft chairs and soft beds, a voluptuous pleasure in spicy, narcotic scents, and a craving for luxury which was neither ruled by good taste nor refined by love of the beautiful. True, she had scant means of gratifying these desires, but that did not lessen their force.

She had grown fuller of form and paler, and there was a slow languor in all her movements. Her eyes were generally quite empty of expression, but sometimes they would grow strangely bright, and she had fallen into the habit of setting her lips in a meaningless smile.

There came a time when they wrote sixteen hundred and eighty-nine. It was night, and the horse-stable at Tjele was on fire. The flickering flames burst through the heavy clouds of brown smoke; they lit up the grassy courtyard, shone on the low outhouses and the white walls of the manor-house, and even touched with light the black crowns of the trees in the garden where they rose high above the roof. Servants and neighbors ran from the well to the fire with pails and buckets full of water glittering red in the light of the flames. Palle Dyre was here, there, and everywhere, tearing wildly about, his hair flying, a red wooden rake in his hand. Erik Grubbe lay praying over an old chaff-bin, which had been carried out. He watched the progress of the fire from beam to beam, his agony growing more intense every moment, and he groaned audibly whenever the flames leaped out triumphantly and swung their spirals high above the house in a shower of sparks.

Marie, too, was there, but her eyes sought something besides the fire. They were fixed on the new coachman, who was taking the frightened horses out from the smoke-filled stable. The doorway had been widened to more than double its usual size by lifting off the frame and tearing down a bit of the frail wall on either side, and through this opening he was leading the animals, one by either hand. They were crazed with the smoke, and when the stinging, flickering light of the flames met their eyes, they reared wildly and threw themselves to one side, until it seemed the man must be torn to pieces or be trampled down between the powerful brutes. Yet he neither fell nor lost his hold; he forced their noses down on the ground and ran with them, half driving, half dragging them, across the courtyard to the gate of the garden, where he let them go.

There were many horses at Tjele, and Marie had plenty of time to admire that beautiful, gigantic form in changing postures, as he struggled with the spirited animals, one moment hanging from a straight arm, almost lifted from the ground by a rearing stallion, the next instant thrown violently down and gripping the earth with his feet, then again urging them on by leaps and bounds, always with the same peculiarly quiet, firm, elastic movements seen only in very strong men. His short cotton breeches and blue-gray shirt looked yellow where the light fell on them but black in the shadows, and outlined sharply the vigorous frame making a fine, simple background for the ruddy face with its soft, fair down on lip and chin, and the great shock of blonde hair.