Kapitel I
Bartholine's marriage
Bartholine is the eldest daughter of the Blid family — practical, prosperous, devout in the lukewarm way of country people. She is not of their kind. She lives on poems, dreams them, and trusts them above everything else in the world. When Lyhne of Lönborggaard, the young squire of the neighboring estate, comes courting, she falls in love at once: here at last, she thinks, is a man from the great outside world. They are married. The first year is romance; then his appetite for it is exhausted, and hers turns into doubt. By the end of the chapter they are estranged inside the same house, and Bartholine has brought a son into the world. They call him Niels.
Kapitel II
Tug-of-war
In a way the child has brought the parents back together — over his cradle they meet in a common hope. But they are still far apart, and as Niels grows older the difference between them becomes the weather of his childhood. Bartholine reaches him through the imagination, telling him stories of heroes and a stillborn second son she has imagined into a paragon. Lyhne reaches him through the matter-of-fact: the fields, the parish, the slow rhythm of the seasons. Niels feels at home with both at different hours and ashamed of the alternation. The chapter closes on a boy who already understands, without being able to say so, that he lives between two temperaments and has not yet chosen.
Kapitel III
Bigum and Edele
Niels is twelve. He has outgrown the games of his early childhood and begun to read; he and Frithjof, the pastor's son, walk arm in arm telling stories no book has bothered to write. Two new figures arrive at Lönborggaard within the same month. The first is Mr. Bigum, the new tutor — a candidate for holy orders, slightly deaf, devoted to philosophy and the violin, secretly convinced his intellect is wider than that of other men. The second is Edele Lyhne, Lyhne's twenty-six-year-old sister, sent home from Copenhagen on doctor's orders for her lungs. She arrives bored, elegant, contemptuous of the country. The chapter is the long, careful introduction of the two minds that will shape Niels's next years.
Kapitel IV
Edele dies
Edele's health does not improve at Lönborggaard. The local pastor, a kindly man, begins to visit her with the gentle persistence of a clergyman who senses death approaching a soul he believes himself responsible for. He offers her, by stages, the consolations of faith. She receives each one with calm and refuses it. She does not argue. She does not soften. She dies in possession of herself, on her own terms, with no concession made and no unhappiness shown. Niels is at the bedside in the way a boy of twelve is at the bedside of a beautiful aunt he has half worshipped from a distance, and what he takes from the room is the conviction that the consolations of faith are addressed to a fear he refuses to flatter. His atheism begins here. The novel will return to this room again and again across thirty years.
Kapitel V
Erik arrives
Some years after Edele's death, a cousin's son comes to live at Lönborggaard. Erik Refstrup is a few years older than Niels — broad-shouldered, easy in the world, with the kind of confidence Niels does not have and watches with admiration. He intends to be a sculptor. He brings into the quiet house a different temperament from the one Niels has grown up between: not dreamy like his mother, not steady like his father, but sociable, ambitious, bodily, ready. The two boys become close in the way boys do when one has what the other lacks. The friendship will carry Niels through his student years in Copenhagen and through the catastrophe at Mariagerfjord.
Kapitel VI
Mrs. Boye's salon
Niels is now in Copenhagen as a student — vaguely enrolled, more vaguely attending lectures, mostly reading on his own. Erik, ahead of him in the city, takes him one evening to the salon of an older widow named Mrs. Boye. She is witty, unattached, modern; her drawing room is the meeting place of students and minor poets and the better sort of editor. She talks about Heine and the freedoms of married women. Niels, twenty, is given his apprenticeship in the world. The chapter is the long, careful introduction of the woman who will become his first real love and his first real loss.
Kapitel VII
The declaration
In Mrs. Boye's circle the talk one evening turns to God. There are believers in the room and the half-believers who outnumber them in any nineteenth-century salon, and the conversation moves in the patient way of educated people who have agreed not to be rude about it. Niels speaks. He has held his position privately since the bedside of his aunt Edele eight years before; he declares it now in public for the first time. The chapter is small but pivotal: the position is no longer a secret he keeps but a position he is known for. The first cost of holding it begins.
Kapitel VIII
Mrs. Boye, Clarens
Niels and Mrs. Boye become lovers. The novel handles the affair as it handles everything: with patient particularity rather than scandal. They are happy in their way; she is the older partner; he is being formed by her without quite knowing it. Then word arrives from Lönborggaard that Bartholine's health is giving way, and Niels takes his mother south for the journey she has dreamed of since her girlhood — through Hamburg and the Alps to Italy. She sees Lake Garda. She is happy. She dies at Clarens. Niels comes back to Copenhagen to find his life with Mrs. Boye no longer quite the life it was.
Kapitel IX
Christmas Eve atheism
It is the Christmas after Niels's mother's death and Mrs. Boye's marriage to another man. Niels does not go home to Lönborggaard. He spends Christmas Eve in town with Hjerrild, the older editor he has known since Mrs. Boye's salon. The two of them sit late over a bottle and argue. Hjerrild defends a life lived without God but quietly — privately, courteously, without scandal. Niels insists that the position must be held in public if it is to be held at all. The chapter is the novel's clearest sustained dialogue on what atheism costs and how it should be borne.
Kapitel X
Erik married
Erik has married. The young woman is Fennimore — younger than the friends, gentle, intelligent, attached to Erik in a way that has not yet been tested. They have taken a small manor in the village of Fjordby on Mariagerfjord, in north Jutland. Niels visits. He finds Erik no longer working — the sculptor's tools laid by, the studio empty, drink at the elbow more often than is good — and Fennimore, in the long days of the country, increasingly alone with herself. The chapter is the patient setup of the catastrophe.
Kapitel XI
The catastrophe
The affair begins almost without a decision. Niels and Fennimore — the lonely wife, the half-sleeping guest — fall into it across a few summer weeks while Erik is in the village or in his studio or, more often, neither. Then, on a drive home from town in bad weather, Erik's carriage overturns and he is killed. Fennimore turns on Niels with a fury the novel takes seriously: she calls him by every name his behavior has earned and refuses to see him again. Niels leaves Mariagerfjord. The chapter is the catastrophe the book never recovers from, and it is the one Niels does not.
Kapitel XII
Riva
Niels does not go straight back to Lönborggaard. He travels — Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy — for the better part of a year, in the way of men who are trying to outrun a chapter they have just lived. At Riva on Lake Garda he stays for some weeks. He meets Madame Odéro, an opera singer recovering her voice after illness; they walk the lake together; they sit in cafés in the long Italian evenings; they conduct the kind of half-romance the novel does not pretend is more than what it is. She returns to her stage. He goes home.
Kapitel XIII
Gerda and the prayer
Back at Lönborggaard, Niels marries late. Gerda is the daughter of a neighboring family — gentle, religious, much younger than he is — and the marriage is, against the evidence of the novel, a quiet happiness. They have a son. Then Gerda's health gives way and she dies, frightened, having lost her faith on her deathbed. A year later the son falls ill. Niels — modern, secular, twenty years past Edele's deathbed — finds himself praying for the boy. The boy dies. Niels gets up from beside the bed and never prays again. The novel's most exposed test of his atheism is in this room.
Kapitel XIV
The deathbed
War comes. In the spring of 1864 Denmark fights Prussia and Austria over Schleswig and loses badly. Niels enlists — partly out of patriotism, partly out of the long ache to do something he cannot live inside his head. He is shot in a minor engagement and brought back 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 simply, at the end, what Niels does.