Then she would understand.
On the second day they walked up to the hut alone. It had been meticulously and reverently preserved and furnished; it had two small rooms, one room where the philosopher was supposed to work, one where he would sleep. They had forgotten to set up a kitchen; it was assumed that the primitive conditions would be mitigated by having servants bring meals up from the Ascheberg estate.
With great interest she read the poetical quotations that covered the walls and ceiling, and Struensee told her about Rousseau.
She felt utterly happy.
Then he took out the book. They sat down on the very beautiful baroque sofa that stood in the study; the elder Rantzau had purchased it in Paris in 1755 and later had it placed in the hut in anticipation of Rousseau’s visit. The book he was going to read to her was Ludvig Holberg’s Moral Thoughts.
Why had he chosen that particular book?
At first she thought that this book, this choice, was much too gloomy; he then asked her to forget for a moment the name of the book, which was perhaps not overly exciting, and allow him to read the titles of the epigrams, which, he intimated, would present an entirely different impression.
“Something forbidden?” she asked.
“To the highest degree,” he replied.
The titles did indeed catch her interest.“Do not waste time on empty activities. Only the mad are happy. I refuse to marry. Abandon an opinion if it is refuted. All crimes and sins are not equally serious. Only the ignorant believe they know everything. You are happy if you imagine yourself happy. Some people sin and beg by turns. Time and place determine what is moral. Virtue and vice change with the times. Abolish rhyme in the art of poetry. The poet lives in honor and poverty. Reforms easily slip out of control. Weigh carefully the consequences of a reform. Doctors should answer questions rather than lecture. Agreement deadens, conflict stimulates. Bad taste has great benefits. We have a great desire for what is forbidden.”
There, at the last title, she stopped him.
“That’s true,” she said. “That’s very true. And I want to know what Ludvig Holberg says about it.”
“As you wish,” he said.
But he started off with a different epigram.
She suggested that he should make his own choice among the epigrams, so that the reading would end with the text about the forbidden. She wanted to have the context first, and Holberg’s reflections. He started with Number 84, titled “Time and place determine what is moral.” He began reading the text on the second afternoon they spent at Rousseau’s hut, during that late-September week at Ascheberg, the estate he knew so well, which was part of his former life, the life he had almost forgotten but was now trying to reclaim.
He was trying to find a sense of continuity in his life. He knew that it had continuity, but he was not yet in control of it.
On the third afternoon he read the epigram that began with the sentence, “Morality is whatever conforms to the accepted fashion of the day, and immorality is what conflicts with it.” Then he read epigram Number 20 in Book IV, the one that begins with the sentence, “The most peculiar of human attributes is that people have the greatest desire for what is the most forbidden.”
She thought his voice was so lovely.
She liked Ludvig Holberg too. It was as if the voices of Struensee and Holberg merged into one. It was a dark, warm voice that spoke to her of a world she had never known before; the voice embraced her, she felt as if she were floating in warm water, which shut out the court and Denmark and the King and everything else; like water, as if she were floating in the warm sea of life and was not afraid.
She thought his voice was so lovely. She told him so.
“You have such a lovely voice, Doctor Struensee.”
He kept on reading.
She was wearing an evening gown made of a light fabric since it was late summer and warm, a very light fabric that she had chosen because of the mild summer night. She felt freer in it. The gown was low cut. Her skin was very young, and occasionally, when he looked up from the book, his eyes would rest on her skin; then they would pause on her hands, and he suddenly remembered his thought about that hand wrapped around his member, a thought he had once had, and then he went back to reading.
“Doctor Struensee,” she said suddenly, “you must touch my arm while you read.”
“Why?” he asked after only a brief hesitation.
“Because otherwise the words are so dry. You must touch my skin and then I can better understand what the words mean.”
And so he touched her arm. It was uncovered and very soft. He could tell at once that it was very soft.
“Touch my hand,” she said. ”Slowly.”
“Your Majesty,” he said, ”I’m afraid that …”
“Touch it,” she said.
He went on reading, his hand sliding softly over her bare arm. Then she said:
“I think that Holberg is saying that the most forbidden is a boundary.”
“A boundary?”
“A boundary. And wherever the boundary exists, there is life, and death, and thus the greatest desire.”
His hand moved, and then she took his hand in her own, pressed it to her throat.
“The greatest desire,” she whispered,“exists at the boundary. It’s true. It’s true what Holberg writes.”
“Where is the boundary?” he whispered.
“Find it,” she said.
And then the book fell out of his hand.
It was she, not he, who locked the door.
She was not afraid, she didn’t fumble as they took off their clothes; she continued to feel as if she were in the warm water of life and nothing was dangerous and death was quite close and thus everything was exciting. Everything seemed very soft and slow and warm.
They lay down next to each other, naked, in the bed that stood in the inner alcove of the hut, where once the French philosopher Rousseau was supposed to have slept, though he never did. That was where they now lay. It filled her with excitement, it was a sacred place and they were about to cross the boundary, it was the utmost forbidden, the very utmost. The place was forbidden, she was forbidden, it was nearly perfect.
They touched each other. She caressed his member with her hand. She liked it, it was hard but she waited because their nearness to the boundary was so exciting and she wanted to hold on to the moment.
“Wait,” she said.“Not yet.”
He lay beside her and caressed her, they breathed each other in, quite calmly and filled with desire, and she understood all at once that he was like her. That he could breathe as she did. In the same breath. That he was in her lungs and that they were breathing the same air.
He wanted to come inside her, a little way, he was now very close, she caressed his neck and whispered:
“Not all the way. Not yet.”
She felt his member touch her, slip inside a little way, go away, come back.
“Not all the way,” she said.“Wait.”
He waited, almost inside her, but waiting.
“There,” she whispered. “Not yet. My beloved. You must move in and out at the boundary.”
“The boundary?” he asked.
“Yes, there. Can you feel the boundary?”
“Don’t move,” he said.“Don’t move.”
He understood. They would wait, sniff at each other like horses touching each other’s muzzle, everything would happen very quietly, he understood.
And she was seized by a wave of happiness, he understood, he would wait, soon she would give the signal, soon; he understood.
“The boundary,” she whispered again and again as desire slowly, slowly rose through her body. “Can you feel it, the greatest desire, more, there’s the boundary.”
Outside dusk was falling. He lay on top of her, practically motionless, sliding almost imperceptibly in and out.
“There,” she whispered.“Very soon. Cross the boundary now. Come in. Oh, go across now.”
And at last, very qui
etly, he slid the tip inside her and passed over the most forbidden of boundaries, and it was as it should be.
Now, she thought, this is like paradise.
When it was over she lay with her eyes closed, and smiled. Silently he dressed and stood by the window for a moment, looking out.
It was dusk and he looked out across the vast park, down at the long valley, the lake, the canal, the trees, the tamed and the wild.
They were on the Mountain. And it had happened.
“We must go down to them,” he said in a low voice.
Here nature was perfect. Here was the wild, and the tamed. He thought suddenly of what they had left behind, the court, Copenhagen. How it looked when a light mist hovered over Øresund. That was the other world. There the water was no doubt quite black tonight, the swans were curled up and asleep; he thought about what she had told him, about the water like quicksilver and the birds sleeping wrapped in their dreams. And how all at once a bird would rise up, the tips of its wings beating the surface of the water, how it became free and disappeared into the mist.
Mist, water, and birds that slept wrapped in their dreams.
And then the palace, like a menacing, horror-filled ancient castle, biding its time.
PART IV
THE PERFECT SUMMER
CHAPTER 10
IN THE LABYRINTH
1.
THE TAKEOVER OF power occurred quickly, almost artlessly. A communiqué was simply delivered. It merely confirmed something that was already fact.
The formal confirmation of the Danish revolution was a decree. No one knew who had written or dictated the document that would so dramatically change the history of Denmark. A royal proclamation was issued regarding certain changes in the internal lines of command; they might have been called convulsions close to the dark and inscrutable heart of power.
J. F. Struensee was appointed “Privy Cabinet Minister,” and the royal proclamation was worded as follows: “All commands which I give to him verbally he may then carry out in accordance with my intentions and present for my signature after he has paraphrased them, or execute them in my name under the seal of the Cabinet.” It went on to say, as if to elucidate, that the King would, of course, be presented once a week with an “abstract” of the decrees thus issued by Struensee, but it emphasized, clarified, should anyone have misunderstood the fundamental significance of the opening sentence, that a decree with Struensee’s signature “had the same authority as those inscribed with the King’s.”
The title “Privy Cabinet Minister,” which was new and exclusive, since the newly appointed Struensee was the only one left of the many who were excluded, perhaps did not mean much. It was the right to implement laws without the King’s signature that was so significant.”Or execute them in my name under the seal of the Cabinet,” as it was formulated.
In practice this meant that the absolute ruler, King Christian VII, turned over all power to a German doctor, J. F. Struensee. Denmark was in German hands.
Or in those of the Enlightenment. Within the court it was impossible to determine which was worse.
The takeover of power was a fact. Afterward no one could understand how it happened.
Perhaps they both found it practical. There was no talk of a revolution.
A practical reform. The practical part was that Struensee would exercise all power.
After the decision was made, Christian seemed relieved; his tics diminished, his aggressive outbursts ceased altogether for a time, and for brief periods he seemed utterly happy. His dog and the Negro page Moranti took up more and more of his time. He could now devote himself to them. Struensee could devote himself to his work.
Yes, it was practical.
There came a time, after the decree, when practical matters were functioning splendidly, and they drew closer to one another. They drew closer in terms of both the practical and the insane, Struensee often thought. He had the feeling that Christian, he himself, the Negro page Moranti, and the dog were all welded together—like conspiratorial participants in a secret expedition bound for the dark heart of reason. Everything was clarity and reason, but illuminated by the King’s insanity, the strange dark torch that burst forth and disappeared, capricious and ruthless, letting its flickering darkness wrap around them in a completely natural manner. Slowly they drew together, as if in a safe mountain cavern, decelerating, returning to a form of family life that looked completely normal, were it not for the circumstances.
Were it not for the circumstances.
Struensee would sit in his cabinet room, with the door locked and guards outside, with the stacks of documents on the table and the writing materials laid out, while the boys and the dog played around him. The boys were excellent company. He could concentrate so well while the boys were playing. Those were long afternoons of absolute calm and almost joyful solitude; alone in the room except for the boys, as he was in the habit of calling them whenever he thought of them, meaning the King and the Negro page.
The boys played quietly and calmly under the table. The dog, a schnauzer, was always with them.
As Struensee wrote and worked, he would hear their movements around the room, their whispering voices; nothing more. He thought: They see me as a father who must not be disturbed. They play at my feet and they hear the scratching of my pen, and they whisper.
They whisper out of consideration. How splendid. And sometimes he would feel an enormously tranquil wave of warmth rise up inside him; the room was so quiet, the autumn outside so beautiful, the sounds of the city so distant, the children so endearing, the dog so lively, everything was so splendid. They showed consideration. They played under the gigantic oak table that was no longer surrounded by the mighty of the realm, but only by one mighty man. But they didn’t regard him as the mighty man, but merely as the kind, silent man, the one who existed only as a father figure, present through the scratching sound of his pen.
The silent one. Vati. Lieber Vati, ich mag Dir, wir spielen, lieber lieber Vati. Pappa. Dear Pappa, I love you, we’re playing, dear dear Pappa.
Perhaps the only children I’ll ever have.
Is this how my life will be? he sometimes thought. Quiet work, a pen that scratches, unprecedented reforms that painlessly slip out into real life, my boys playing with the dog under the table.
If so, how splendid.
There were also moments at that writing table that contained an element of fear.
Christian popped up from his quiet games under the table. He sat down on the edge and regarded Struensee thoughtfully, shy but curious. His wig had been tossed into a corner, his clothing was disheveled; yet, or perhaps for that very reason, he looked endearing.
He simply sat there and watched; then he asked timidly what Struensee was writing and what he was about to sign.
“Your Majesty has just reduced the army,” Struensee said with a smile. “We have no external enemies. This pointless army will now be smaller, and cheaper; a savings of sixteen thousand riksdaler per year.”
“Is that true?” asked Christian. “We don’t have any external enemies?”
“It’s true. Not Russia, not Sweden. And we’re not thinking of attacking Turkey. Aren’t we in agreement about this?”
“And what do the generals say?”
“They will become our enemies. But we can handle them.”
“But what about the enemies we’ll have at court?”
“Against them,” said Struensee with a smile, “it would be difficult to use this vast army.”
“That’s true,” said Christian with great solemnity. “So we want to cut back the army?”
“Yes, we do.”
“Then I agree,” said Christian with the same solemnity.
“Not everyone is going to approve,” Struensee added.
“But do you approve, Doctor Struensee?”
“Yes. And we’re going to do much, much more.”
That was when Christian said it. Struensee would never forget it; only a month a
fter the moment when the book fell out of his hand and he crossed the boundary to the most forbidden. Christian was sitting on the table close to him, the pale October sun was shining in, making great rectangles on the floor, and that’s when he said it.
“Doctor Struensee,” said Christian in a low voice and with such a solemn tone, as if he had never been the demented boy playing under the cabinet table with his Negro page and his dog. “Doctor Struensee, I beseech you most urgently. The Queen is lonely. Attend to her.”
Struensee went completely rigid.
He put down his pen, and after a moment he said:
“What does His Majesty mean? I don’t understand.”
“You understand everything. Attend to her. This burden I cannot bear.”
“How am I to understand this?”
“You understand everything. I love you.”
To that, Struensee made no reply.
He understood, and yet he did not. Did the King know? But Christian merely touched his arm with a light caress, looked at him with a smile that was so painfully uncertain but at the same time so beautiful that Struensee would never forget it, and then, with an almost imperceptible movement, he slid off the edge of the table and returned to the little Negro page and the dog, down there underneath the table where pain was not visible and the black torch did not burn, and only the little dog and the Negro page existed.
And where everything was quiet happiness and affection with the only family that King Christian VII would ever know.
2.
When the Life Guards were demobilized, Guldberg was present, and to his surprise he saw that Count Rantzau had also come to observe this new cost-saving measure.
Collection of weapons and uniforms. Home leaves.
Guldberg went over to Rantzau and greeted him. Together and in silence they watched the ceremonies.
“A transformation of Denmark,” Rantzau said expectantly.
“Yes,” replied Guldberg,”So many transformations are taking place. All at a rapid pace, as you know. I understand that this pleases you. Your friend, ‘the Silent One,’ works fast. Only this morning I read the decree about ‘Freedom of Thought and Freedom of Expression.’ So imprudent of you. To abolish censorship. Very imprudent.”
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