Chapter 8 — The affair, the mother's death at Clarens

The chapter opens on the affair. Niels and Mrs. Boye have become lovers; the novel does not stage the moment, it registers the consequence. They are happy in their way through a Copenhagen winter. He spends evenings in her rooms; he walks home through the snow at midnight; he discovers in himself the capacity to be loved and the parallel capacity to be quietly afraid of it. Mrs. Boye, older and more experienced, treats him with a kindness that is not condescension and a candor that is not cruelty. They both know the relationship is asymmetrical; both pretend, sometimes, that it is not. The chapter's first half is the only sustained passage of plain happiness Niels has in the book.

Then the letter from Lönborggaard. Bartholine's health, never robust, has given way; the doctors have recommended a milder climate. Niels travels home. He finds his mother smaller than he remembered, frighteningly tired, still — as ever — talking about the Italy of her girlhood's books. He proposes to take her there. Lyhne agrees. They go: by ship to Hamburg, by stages through Germany, across the Alps, down into the lake country of northern Italy. Bartholine, in the diligence and on the steamers, is happier than Niels has ever seen her. She sees Lake Garda. She walks under the cypresses she has read about for forty years. She smiles at her son in a way that, in the chapters before, she had only smiled at her books.

She dies at Clarens — Clarens on Lake Geneva, where they have come for the air. The death is gentle; she has, in a sense, completed her unfinished business with the world before it. Niels buries her. He travels home alone. He returns to Copenhagen older and less confident than he had left it. The affair with Mrs. Boye does not survive the year. She marries another man; he reads about it in a newspaper. The chapter's arc, end to end, is the slow loss of two of the women who had organized his life — the mother who had given him his inwardness and the lover who had given him his apprenticeship in the world.