All 14 chapters — a whole life, from the parents' marriage to the bedside refusal.
The novel moves in fourteen chapters, each one a movement in the long disillusionment. Chapters I–II open at Lönborggaard with Bartholine's marriage and Niels's birth, the two parents pulling at the boy from opposite directions. Chapters III–IV bring the tutor Bigum, the arrival of the beautiful Edele, and her calm death without faith — the moment Niels's atheism is born. Chapters V–IX move through Copenhagen: Erik's arrival, Mrs. Boye's salon, Niels's public declaration of unbelief, the affair with Boye, the death of his mother at Lake Garda, and the Christmas Eve dialogue with Hjerrild. Chapters X–XI deliver the catastrophe at Mariagerfjord: Erik's marriage to Fennimore, Niels's affair with her, Erik's sudden death, Fennimore's denunciation. Chapters XII–XIV bring the late marriage to Gerda at Lönborggaard, the death of their son, Niels's prayer in extremity, the war, and the deathbed refusal of the priest.
The parents, the boy, the tutor, the aunt who dies without God.
Bartholine Blid lives on poems and trusts them above the world she actually lives in. The young squire Lyhne courts her; she takes him for the poetic nature he half is and they marry. The first year passes like the courtship. Then his appetite for romance gives out. By the end of the chapter they are estranged inside the same house and a son has been born. They call him Niels.
The cradle has brought the parents into a brief truce, but they are still far apart, and the boy grows up between them. Bartholine reaches Niels through stories of heroes and the imagined life of a stillborn second son. Lyhne reaches him through fields and parish and the steady weight of the commonplace. Niels feels at home with both at different hours, and ashamed of the alternation.
Niels is twelve and reading, walking the road with the pastor's son Frithjof telling stories the books will not bother with. Two new figures arrive at the estate. Bigum, the new tutor: deaf, philosophical, secretly a genius. Edele, his father's sister: home from Copenhagen with weak lungs, bored, elegant, contemptuous of the country. The chapter is their long careful arrival.
Edele's lungs do not heal. The pastor begins to visit her, offering the consolations of faith with gentle persistence. She refuses each one with calm and good manners and dies in possession of herself. Niels is at the bedside. He takes from the room the conviction that the consolations of faith are addressed to a fear he refuses to flatter. The atheism that will define his life begins here.
Erik, Mrs. Boye, the declaration, the mother's death, Hjerrild on Christmas Eve.
A few years after Edele's death, Erik Refstrup — a cousin's son, broad-shouldered, sociable, intending to be a sculptor — comes to live at Lönborggaard. He has the easy confidence Niels does not have, and Niels watches him with admiration. The friendship that will carry Niels through his twenties and through the catastrophe at Mariagerfjord begins.
Niels is in Copenhagen, vaguely a student, mostly a reader. Erik takes him to the salon of an older widow. Mrs. Boye is witty, unattached, modern; her drawing room argues about Heine and the freedoms of married women. Niels, twenty, gets his apprenticeship in the world from her. The woman who will be his first real love is being introduced.
In Mrs. Boye's drawing room one evening the conversation turns to God. The room has believers and half-believers. Niels, who has held his atheism privately since Edele's death, declares it in public for the first time. The chapter is small but pivotal. The position is no longer a secret. He will now be known for it.
Niels and Mrs. Boye become lovers; the affair runs through a Copenhagen winter with the particularity of all love affairs in this novel — happy in its way, asymmetrical, real. Then Niels's mother's health gives way and he takes her south to the Italy she has dreamed of for forty years. She sees Lake Garda. She is happy. She dies at Clarens.
It is Christmas Eve after the mother's death and Mrs. Boye's marriage to another. Niels stays in town with Hjerrild the editor. They argue across a long evening about whether unbelief is best held in private or declared. The chapter is the novel's clearest sustained dialogue on what the position costs.
Erik married to Fennimore, the affair, the accident, the denunciation.
Erik has married Fennimore — younger than the friends, gentle, intelligent — and taken her to a small manor at Mariagerfjord. Niels visits. He finds Erik no longer working, the studio empty, drink at the elbow more often than it should be, and Fennimore alone with herself in the country. The catastrophe is being set up with great patience.
The affair begins almost without a decision. Then Erik is killed in a road accident on the way home from town in bad weather. Fennimore turns on Niels with a fury the novel takes seriously and refuses to see him again. Niels leaves Mariagerfjord. The chapter is the catastrophe the book never recovers from, and the one Niels does not.
Riva, Gerda, the dying child, the war, the priest refused.
Niels travels for the better part of a year — Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy — trying to outrun the catastrophe. At Riva on Lake Garda he meets Madame Odéro, an opera singer recovering her voice after illness, and they conduct a long convalescent half-romance through the lake evenings. She returns to her stage. He goes home.
Back at Lönborggaard, Niels marries Gerda — gentle, religious, much younger than he is. They have a son. Gerda dies losing her faith on her deathbed. A year later the boy falls ill. Niels, modern and secular, finds himself praying. The boy dies anyway. Niels gets up from beside the bed and never prays again. The novel's most exposed test.
War comes. Denmark fights Prussia in 1864 and loses. Niels enlists, is shot in a minor engagement, and is brought to a field hospital with a wound that will not heal. A priest is offered to him in the last hours. He sends the priest away. The novel ends. Jacobsen does not present the refusal as triumph. It is, at the end, what Niels does.