Marie Grubbe, Jens Peter Jacobsen [historical books to read .TXT] 📗
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anguish. I wept for this love through long nights; I prayed for it as
if it had been the dearly loved child of my heart that was dying by
inches. I cast about for aid and advice in my trouble and for physics
to cure your sick love, and whatever secret potions I had heard of,
such as love philtres, I mixed them betwixt hope and fear in your
morning draught and your supper wine. I laid out your breast-cloth
under three waxing moons and read the marriage psalm over it, and on
your bedstead I first painted with my own blood thirteen hearts in a
cross, but all to no avail, my lord, for your love was sick unto
death. Faith, that is the way you were loved.”
“No. Marie, my love is not dead; it is risen again. Hear me, dear
heart, hear me! for I have been stricken with blindness and with a mad
distemper, but now, Marie, I kneel at your feet, and look, I woo you
again with prayers and beseechings. Alack, my love has been like a
wilful child, but now it is grown to man’s estate. Pray give yourself
trustingly to its arms, and I swear to you by the cross and the honor
of a gentleman that it will never let you go again.”
“Peace, peace, what help is in that!”
“Pray, pray believe me, Marie!”
“By the living God, I believe you. There is no shred nor thread of
doubt in my soul. I believe you fully; I believe that your love is
great and strong, but mine you have strangled with your own hands. It
is a corpse, and however loudly your heart may call, you can never
wake it again.”
“Say not so, Marie, for those of your sex—I know there are among you
those who when they love a man, even though he spurn them with his
foot, come back ever and ever again, for their love is proof against
all wounds.”
“‘Tis so indeed, my lord, and I—I am such a woman, I would have you
know—but you are not the right kind of man.”
May God in his mercy keep you, my dearly beloved sister, and be to you
a good and generous giver of all those things which are requisite and
necessary as well for the body as for the soul that I wish you from my
heart.
To you, my dearly beloved sister, my one faithful friend from the time
of my childhood, will I now relate what fine fruits I have of my
elevation, which may it be cursed from the day it began; for it has,
God knows, brought me naught but trouble and tribulation in brimming
goblets.
Ay, it was an elevation for the worse, as you, my dearly beloved
sister, shall now hear and as is probably known to you in part. For it
cannot fail that you must have learned from your dear husband how,
even at the time of our dwelling in Sjaelland, there was a coolness
between me and my noble lord and spouse. Now here at Aggershus matters
have in no way mended, and he has used me so scurvily that it is past
all belief but is what I might have looked for in so dainty a junker.
Not that I care a rush about his filthy gallantries; it is all one to
me, and he may run amuck with the hangman’s wife if so be his
pleasure. All I ask is that he do not come too near me with his
tricks, but that is precisely what he is now doing, and in such manner
that one might fain wonder whether he were stricken with madness or
possessed of the devil. The beginning of it was on a day when he came
to me with fair words and fine promises and would have all be as
before between us, whereas I feel for him naught but loathing and
contempt and told him in plain words that I held myself far too good
for him. Then hell broke loose, for wenn’s de Duvel friert, as the
saying is, macht er sein Holle gluhn, and he made it hot for me by
dragging into the castle swarms of loose women and filthy jades and
entertaining them with food and drink in abundance, ay, with costly
sweetmeats and expensive stand-dishes as at any royal banquet. And for
this my flowered damask tablecloths, which I have gotten after our
blessed mother, and my silk bolsters with the fringes were to have
been laid out, but that did not come to pass inasmuch as I put them
all under lock and key, and he had to go borrowing in the town for
wherewithal to deck both board and bench.
My own dearly beloved sister, I will no longer fatigue you with tales
of this vile company, but is it not shameful that such trulls, who if
they were rightly served should have the lash laid on their back at
the public whipping-post, now are queening it in the halls of his
Majesty the King’s Viceroy? I say ‘tis so unheard of and so infamous
that if it were to come to the ears of his Majesty, as with all my
heart and soul I wish that it may come, he would talk to meinguten
Ulrik Friederlch in such terms as would give him but little joy to
hear. The finest of all his tricks I have yet told you nothing of, and
it is quite new, for it happened only the other day that I sent for a
tradesman to bring me some Brabantian silk lace that I thought to put
around the hem of a sack, but the man made answer that when I sent the
money he would bring the goods, for the Viceroy had forbidden him to
sell me anything on credit. The same word came from the milliner who
had been sent for so it would appear that he has stopped my credit in
the entire city, although I have brought to his estate thousands and
thousands of rix-dollars. No more today. May we commit all unto the
Lord, and may He give me ever good tidings of you.
Ever your faithful sister,
MARIE GRUBBE.
At Aggershus Castle, 12 December 1665.
The Honorable Mistress Anne Marie Grubbe, Styge Hogh’s, Magistrate of
Laaland, my dearly beloved sister, graciously to hand.
God in his mercy keep you, my dearest sister, now and forever is my
wish from a true heart, and I pray for you that you may be of good
cheer and not let yourself be utterly cast down, for we have all our
allotted portion of sorrow, and we swim and bathe in naught but
misery.
Your letter, M. D. S., came to hand safe and unbroken in every way,
and thence I have learned with a heavy heart what shame and dishonor
your husband is heaping upon you, which it is a grievous wrong in his
Majesty’s Viceroy to behave as he behaves. Nevertheless, it behooves
you not to be hasty, my duck, for you have cause for patience in that
high position in which you have been placed, which it were not well to
wreck but which it is fitting you should preserve with all diligence.
Even though your husband consumes much wealth on his pleasures, yet is
it of his own he wastes, while my rogue of a husband has made away
with his and mine too. Truly it is a pity to see a man who should
guard what God hath entrusted to us instead scattering and squandering
it. If ‘t were but the will of God to part me from him by whatever
means it might be that would be the greatest boon to me, miserable
woman, for which I could never be sufficiently thankful; and we might
as well be parted, since we have not lived together for upward of a
year, for which may God be praised, and would that it might last! So
you see, M. D. S., that neither is my bed decked with silk. But you
must have faith that your husband will come to his senses in time and
cease to waste his goods on wanton hussies and filthy rabble, and
inasmuch as his office gives him a large income, you must not let your
heart be troubled with his wicked wastefulness nor by his unkindness.
God will help, I firmly trust. Farewell, my duck! I bid you a thousand
good-nights.
Your faithful sister while I live,
ANNE MARIE GRUBBE.
At Vang, 6 February 1666.
Madam Gyldenlove, my good friend and sister, written in all loving
kindness.
May God in his mercy keep you, my dearly beloved sister, and be to you
a good and generous giver of all those things which are requisite and
necessary as well for the body as for the soul that I wish you from my
heart.
My dearly beloved sister, the old saying that none is so mad but he
has a glimmer of sense between St. John and Paulinus no longer holds
good, for my mad lord and spouse is no more sensible than he was. In
truth, he is tenfold, nay athousandfold more frenzied than before, and
thatwhereof I wrote you was but as child’s play to what has now come
to pass, which is beyond all belief. Dearest sister, I would have you
know that he has been to Copenhagen, and thence—oh, fie, most horrid
shame andoutrage!—he has brought one of his old canaille women named
Karen, whom he forthwith lodged in the castle, and she is set over
everything and rules everything while I am let stand behind the door.
But, my dear sister, you must now do me the favor to inquire of our
dear father whether he will take my part, if so be it that I can make
my escape from here, as he surely must, for none can behold my unhappy
state without pitying me, and what I suffer is so past all endurance
that I think I should but be doing right in freeing myself from it. It
is no longer ago than the Day of the Assumption of Our Lady that I was
walking in our orchard, and when I came in again, the door of my
chamber was bolted from within. I asked the meaning of this and was
told that Karen had taken for her own that chamber and the one next to
it, and my bed was moved up into the western parlor, which is cold as
a church when the wind is in that quarter, full of draughts, and the
floor quite rough and has even great holes in it. But if I were to
relate at length all the insults that are heaped upon me here, it
would be as long as any Lenten sermon, and if it is to go on much
longer, my head is like to burst. May the Lord keep us and send me
good tidings of you. Ever your faithful sister,
MARIE GRUBBE.
The Honorable Mistress Anne Marie Grubbe, Sti Heigh’s, Magistrate of
Laaland, my dearly beloved sister, graciously to hand.
Ulrik Frederik, if the truth were told, was as tired of the state of
affairs at the castle as Marie Grubbe was. He had been used to
refining more on his dissipations. They were sorry boon companions,
these poor, common officers in Norway, and their soldiers’ courtesans
were not to be endured for long. Karen Fiol was the only one who was
not made up of coarseness and vulgarity, and even her he would rather
bid good-by today than tomorrow.
In his chagrin at being repulsed by Marie Grubbe, he
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