Marie Grubbe, a Lady of the Seventeenth Century

by J. P. Jacobsen

“My dear Sidse,” he replied, “there’s no sin in that—none at all. Would you call it a sin, Colonel Gyldenlöve? No? Surely not. Does not even Holy Writ tell of witches and evil sorceries? Indeed and indeed it does. What I was about to say is that all our humors have their seat in the blood. If a man is fired with anger, can’t he feel the blood rushing up through his body and flooding his eyes and ears? And if he’s frightened o’ the sudden, does not the blood seem to sink down into his feet and grow cold all in a trice? Is it for nothing, do you think, that grief is pale and joy red as a rose? And as for love, it comes only after the blood has ripened in the summers and winters of seventeen or eighteen years; then it begins to ferment like good grape-wine; it seethes and bubbles. In later years it clears and settles as do other fermenting juices; it grows less hot and fierce. But as good wine begins to effervesce again when the grape-vine is in bloom, so the disposition of man, even of the old, is more than ordinarily inclined to love at certain seasons of the year, when the blood, as it were, remembers the springtime of life.”

“Ay, the blood,” added Oluf Daa, “as a man may say, the blood—’tis a subtle matter to understand—as a man may say.”

“Indeed,” nodded Mistress Rigitze, “everything acts on the blood, both sun and moon and approaching storm, that’s as sure as if ’twere printed.”

“And likewise the thoughts of other people,” said Mistress Ide. “I saw it in my eldest sister. We lay in one bed together, and every night, as soon as her eyes were closed, she would begin to sigh and stretch her arms and legs and try to get out of bed as some one were calling her. And ’twas but her betrothed, who was in Holland, and was so full of longing for her that he would do nothing day and night but think of her, until she never knew an hour’s peace, and her health—don’t you remember, dear Mistress Sidsel, how weak her eyesight was all the time Jörgen Bille was from home?”

“Do I remember? Ah, the dear soul! But she bloomed again like a rosebud. Bless me, her first lying-in—” and she continued the subject in a whisper.

Rosenkrands turned to Axel Urup. “Then you believe,” he said, “that an elixir d’am-our is a fermenting juice poured into the blood? That tallies well with a tale the late Mr. Ulrik Christian told me one day we were on the ramparts together. ’Twas in Antwerp it happened—in the Hotellerie des Trois Brochets, where he had lodgings. That morning at ma-ass he had seen a fair, fair maid-en, and she had looked quite kind-ly at him. All day long she was not in his thoughts, but at night when he entered his chamber, there was a rose at the head of the bed. He picked it up and smelled it, and in the same mo-ment the coun-ter-feit of the maiden stood before him as painted on the wall, and he was seized with such sudden and fu-rious longing for her that he could have cried aloud. He rushed out of the house and into the street, and there he ran up and down, wail-ing like one be-witched. Something seemed to draw and draw him and burn like fire, and he never stopped till day dawned.”

So they talked until the sun went down, and they parted to go home through the darkening streets. Ulrik Frederik joined but little in the general conversation; for he was afraid that if he said anything about love, it might be taken for reminiscences of his relation with Sofie Urne. Nor was he in the mood for talking, and when he and Rosenkrands were alone he made such brief, absentminded replies that his companion soon wearied of him and left him to himself.

Ulrik Frederik turned homeward to his own apartments, which this time were at Rosenborg. His valet being out, there was no light in the large parlor, and he sat alone there in the dark till almost midnight.

He was in a strange mood, divided between regret and foreboding. It was one of those moods when the soul seems to drift as in a light sleep, without will or purpose, on a slowly gliding stream, while mist-like pictures pass on the background of dark trees, and half-formed thoughts rise from the sombre stream like great dimly-lit bubbles that glide—glide onward and burst. Bits of the conversation that afternoon, the motley crowds in the churchyard, Marie Grubbe’s smile, Mistress Rigitze, the Queen, the King’s favor, the King’s anger that other time,—the way Marie moved her hands, Sofie Urne, pale and far away,—yet paler and yet farther away,—the rose at the head of the bed and Marie Grubbe’s voice, the cadence of some word,—he sat listening and heard it again and again winging through the silence.

He rose and went to the window, opened it, and leaned his elbows on the wide casement. How fresh it all was—so cool and quiet! The bittersweet smell of roses cooled with dew, the fresh, pungent scent of new-mown hay, and the spicy fragrance of the flowering maple were wafted in. A mist-like rain spread a blue, tremulous dusk over the garden. The black boughs of the larch, the drooping leafy veil of the birch, and the rounded crowns of the beech stood like shadows breathed on a background of gliding mist, while the clipped yew-trees shot upward like the black columns of a roofless temple.