Marie Grubbe, a Lady of the Seventeenth Century

by J. P. Jacobsen

He would never remain at Kalö for more than two or three days at a time; then he would leave for a week’s visit in the neighborhood, and Marie learned to long for his coming and to sigh when he went away; for he was practically the only company she had. They became very intimate, and there was but little they did not confide to each other.

“Madam,” said Sti one day, “is it your purpose to return to his Excellency, if he make you full and proper apologies?”

“Even though he were to come here crawling on his knees,” she replied, “I would thrust him away. I have naught but contempt and loathing for him in my heart; for there’s not a faithful sentiment in his mind, not one honest drop of warm blood in his body. He is a slimy, cursed harlot and no man. He has the empty, faithless eyes of a harlot and the soulless, clammy desire of a harlot. There has never a warm-blooded passion carried him out of himself; never a heartfelt word cried from his lips. I hate him, Sti, for I feel myself besmirched by his stealthy hands and bawdy words.”

“Then, madam, you will sue for a separation?”

Marie replied that she would, and if her father had only stood by her, the case would have been far advanced, but he was in no hurry, for he still thought the quarrel could be patched up, though it never would be.

They talked of what maintenance she might look for after the divorce, and Marie said that Erik Grubbe meant to demand Kalö on her behalf. Sti thought this was ill-considered. He forecast a very different lot for her than sitting as a dowager in an obscure corner of Jutland and at last, perhaps, marrying a country squire, which was the utmost she could aspire to if she stayed. Her rôle at court was played out, for Ulrik Frederik was in such high favor that he would have no trouble in keeping her away from it and it from her. No, Sti’s advice was that she should demand her fortune in ready money and, as soon as it was paid her, leave the country, never to set foot in it again. With her beauty and grace, she could win a fairer fate in France than here in this miserable land with its boorish nobility and poor little imitation of a court.

He told her so, and the frugal life at Kalö made a good background for the alluring pictures he sketched of the splendid and brilliant court of Louis the Fourteenth. Marie was fascinated, and came to regard France as the theatre of all her dreams.

Sti Högh was as much under the spell of his love for Marie as ever, and he often spoke to her of his passion, never asking or demanding anything, never even expressing hope or regret, but taking for granted that she did not return his love and never would. At first Marie heard him with a certain uneasy surprise, but after a while she became absorbed in listening to these hopeless musings on a love of which she was the source, and it was not without a certain intoxicating sense of power that she heard herself called the lord of life and death to so strange a person as Sti Högh. Before long, however, Sti’s lack of spirit began to irritate her. He seemed to give up the fight merely because the object of it was unattainable, and to accept tamely the fact that too high was too high. She did not exactly doubt that there was real passion underneath his strange words or grief behind his melancholy looks, but she wondered whether he did not speak more strongly than he felt. A hopeless passion that did not defiantly close its eyes to its own hopelessness and storm ahead—she could not understand it and did not believe in it. She formed a mental picture of Sti Högh as a morbid nature, everlastingly fingering himself and hugging the illusion of being richer and bigger and finer than he really was. Since no reality bore out this conception of himself, he seemed to feed his imagination with great feelings and strong passions that were, in truth, born only in the fantastic pregnancy of his over-busy brain. His last words to her—for, at her father’s request, she was returning to Tjele, where he could not follow her—served to confirm her in the opinion that this mental portrait resembled him in every feature.

He had bid her good-by and was standing with his hand on the latch, when he turned back to her, saying: “A black leaf of my book of life is being turned, now that your Kalö days are over, madam. I shall think of this time with longing and anguish, as one who has lost all earthly happiness and all that was his hope and desire, and yet, madam, if such a thing should come to pass as that there were reason to think you loved me, and if I were to believe it, then God only knows what it might make of me. Perhaps it might rouse in me those powers which have hitherto failed to unfold their mighty wings. Then perhaps the part of my nature that is thirsting after great deeds and burning with hope might be in the ascendant, and make my name famous and great. Yet it might as well be that such unutterable happiness would slacken every high-strung fibre, silence every crying demand, and dull every hope. Thus the land of my happiness might be to my gifts and powers a lazy Capua....”