The Royal Physician's Visit

by Per Olov Enquist

  The reason why his tasks ended up being different was that a peculiar incident occurred that made it impossible for Enevold Brandt to be Christian’s companion. This episode, the index finger incident, would eventually cost Brandt his life.

  After the “incident,” Reverdil became the King’s bodyguard. Before, he had been the King’s teacher and friend; now he became his guard. It was a hopeless situation. The wolves had torn to shreds his beloved boy; Christian was now a different person. Nothing was the same as before. Christian had welcomed his old teacher, but not with warmth; he spoke and muttered as if through an icy membrane. The idea that had enticed Reverdil back, the plan to implement the great reform, the plan regarding adscription, faded away.

  Reverdil’s political influence ceased. Serfdom was not abolished.

  During the incident the King was slightly injured.

  On the day when the distressing episode occurred—the “index finger incident” as it came to be called—on that day Struensee had sent by courier a decree to Copenhagen regarding the regional Cupping Stations, the financing of the Foundling Institute, a detailed directive for the religious freedom now proclaimed for Reformists and Catholics, laws authorizing Moravian sects to settle freely in Slesvig, as well as directives for plans to establish a Danish counterpart to the German Real-Schulen.

  The work of an entire week had been sent with a single courier. It had been collecting all week long. Usually a courier was sent every other day.

  Little things became interwoven with big things in a completely natural way. The little things were the reforms. The big thing would turn out to be the index finger.

  Brandt was a flute player.

  Struensee had known him during his days in Altona, and particularly at Ascheberg. That was the period when people hiked up to Rousseau’s hut and read aloud the texts and talked of the time that was to come: when the good people would take command and power, and the reactionary hydra would be driven out, and utopia would be achieved. Brandt had enthusiastically adopted all the new ideas, although they seemed to settle on him like butterflies; they glittered and flew off and then came back, and he appeared to be untouched by them. They adorned him. He found, to his joy, that the ladies of his acquaintance were enchanted by them, which was perhaps the most significant. He was an artist by nature, it seemed to Struensee, spineless but worth loving.

  For him the Enlightenment held a sexual enticement and lent color to life; it made the nights exciting and varied. But for Brandt the Enlightenment was like it was for the Italian actors, and above all like his flute playing.

  It was the flute, Struensee thought during the period at Rousseau’s hut, that made him bearable.

  There was something about his quiet obsession for the flute that made Struensee end up tolerating Brandt’s shallowness. His flute playing told of some other side of Brandt. What Struensee remembered from the Altona days and the evenings spent in the hut in the Ascheberg Gardens was not so much Brandt’s flighty love affairs with “politics” and “art” but rather the solitude that his flute playing created around the young enlightened man.

  Which, for whatever reason, could have assumed any countenance at all.

  Only the glimmer remained.

  Perhaps it was Brandt’s flute playing that, in a way, characterized the magnificent summer of 1771. And some of the sounds from Hirschholm spread elsewhere. Sounds of merriment, freedom, and flute music simmered like a sensual undercurrent even in Copenhagen during that warm and passionate summer. The great royal parks were opened, by Struensee’s decree, to the general public. Entertainments were on the rise, perhaps partially because the authority of the police to restrict bordellos was revoked. A decree was issued making it impossible for the police to continue their custom of “visiting” the bordellos and inns after nine o’clock at night and investigating, through this encroachment, whether any depravity was going on. This visitation principle had regularly been used as a means of blackmailing customers. It had little effect on vice, but it did increase the income of the police. Customers were allowed to pay, on the spot, in order to avoid arrest.

  But for the general populace the liberation of the parks was the important thing.

  “The desecration of the King’s parks”—which referred to engaging in sexual intercourse at night in the royal parks of Copenhagen—had previously been punished with the loss of a finger joint if the person was unable to pay on the spot, which in the end everyone managed to do. Now the parks were opened. Rosenborg Garden, in particular, became a fabulous erotic playground on those warm summer nights in Copenhagen. The lawns and the shrubbery in the darkness, which both concealed and enticed, became a murmuring, laughing, chirping, and playful erotic gathering place, although Rosenborg Garden was soon overtaken by Frederiksberg Garden, which was only partially lit at night.

  Three evenings each week this park was specially opened to masked couples. The people’s right to a masquerade was proclaimed—in public parks, and at night. In actuality this meant the right, with a certain anonymity (the masks), to copulate freely outdoors.

  Masks on their faces, open thighs, and whispering. Before, the royal parks were reserved for the ladies of the court, who would stroll through them at an infinitely slow pace beneath their parasols. But now they were opened to the public, and at night! At night!!! A wave of passion surged over the previously sacred and closed parks. Overpopulated Copenhagen, where the packed slums meant that all passions of the flesh were relegated to crowded rooms where desires were audible and rubbed up against the desire and shame of others … the teeming population of Copenhagen now had access to the new royal preserves of passion.

  Parks, nighttime, seed, the scent of lust.

  It was lewd, offensive, preposterously exciting, and everybody knew that this was the contagion of sin that emanated from the royal whoremongering. Struensee and the Queen were essentially to blame. So shocking! So enticing!!! But for how long??? It seemed as if a heavy, panting, and inflammatory breath were playing over Copenhagen: Such days! Over soon!!!

  It paid to be on guard. No penalties, prohibitions, or righteous indignation any longer applied. It was like a race for time. Soon the lechery would be extinguished by a punitive fire.

  But until then! These brief weeks!! Until then!!!

  It was Brandt’s flute playing that set the tone. Gone was the old pietistic regime’s prohibition against dances, plays, and concerts on Saturdays and Sundays, on fast days, or during Advent. When had anything at all been permitted? As if by magic the prohibitions were gone.

  And now, in the parks, these shadows, bodies, masks, this lust; and beneath all of it a secretive flute.

  2.

  Brandt arrived at Hirschholm three days after the others, and to his surprise he found that he had been appointed the King’s adjutant.

  Nursemaid, they called it. He found himself situated in a castle on an island, far from the masked balls and theater intrigues; his role was to pay attention to Christian’s games and manic chanting. It was all so pointless and aroused his fury. He was the Maître de plaisir, after all! The Cultural Minister! What was cultural about this? This royal kindergarten? He found the excursions out in nature to be exhausting. He found the love between the Queen and Struensee to be frustrating and lacking in all interest for himself. He was exiled from the Italian actresses. He found the games that Caroline Mathilde and Struensee played with the little boy, and their adoration of the little girl, to be ridiculous.

  He missed the court, Copenhagen, and the theater. He felt powerless. His task was to entertain the King, whose behavior was grotesque, as always. He was the guard of a mad monarch.

  He had bigger ambitions. And this gave rise to a conflict.

  Compared to the consequences that followed, the event itself was a comic trifle.

  One day at the Queen’s lunch table, the King, who had not participated in the conversation during the meal but true to custom had merely muttered to himself, suddenly stood up, and in an oddl
y artificial tone of voice, as if he were an actor on stage, pointed at Brandt and shouted:

  “I will now give you a real thrashing with the rod, give you a beating, because you deserve it! It’s you that I’m talking to, Count Brandt, do you hear me?”

  There was utter silence. After a moment Struensee and the Queen pulled King Christian aside and spoke to him earnestly, although not so the others could hear what was said. Then the King burst into tears. With a gesture, but still shaking with sobs, he called for his old teacher Reverdil; together they went out to the anteroom, where Reverdil spoke soothingly to the King and comforted him. Perhaps he also offered his support and encouragement to Christian since Reverdil had always despised Brandt, and perhaps he thought that Christian’s outburst was in some way appropriate.

  In any case, Reverdil did not take Christian to task, and for this he was later criticized.

  The others at the table had decided that the King should now be given a lesson to prevent the recurrence of similar offensive behavior. Struensee sternly conveyed to the King that Brandt should be offered an apology and some form of redress, since he had been publicly humiliated.

  The King merely ground his teeth, plucked at his body with his fingers, and refused.

  Later, after supper, Brandt went to the King’s rooms. He ordered Moranti and the Queen’s page Phebe, who were playing with Christian, to withdraw. Then he locked the door and asked the King what weapon he preferred for the duel that must now be fought.

  The King, horrified and in mortal terror, just shook his head, whereupon Brandt said that their fists would have to suffice. Christian, who often took pleasure in playful wrestling matches, thought that he would perhaps be able to escape in this jesting manner. But Brandt, who was seized by an utterly inexplicable and astonishing fury, knocked Christian down without the least compassion and bellowed abuse at the sobbing monarch. They ended up wrestling on the floor; and when Christian used his hands in an attempt to defend himself, Brandt bit him on the index finger so that blood began to flow.

  Brandt left the King sobbing on the floor, went to find Struensee, and told him that he had now won his redress. The hastily summoned courtiers then bandaged Christian’s finger.

  Struensee forbade anyone to speak of this incident. If someone asked, the position was to be that the King’s life had not been in danger, that Count Brandt had not tried to kill the King, and that the King was accustomed to a playful wrestling match, which was a beneficial exercise for the limbs. But the utmost silence was to be observed about what had taken place.

  To the Queen, however, Struensee said, quite anxiously:

  “In Copenhagen the rumor is circulating that we wish to kill the King. If this gets out, it won’t be good. I don’t understand that Brandt.”

  The next day Brandt was replaced by Reverdil as the head adjutant, and he then had more time for his flute playing. More time for flute playing, which had a direct effect on politics. Reverdil, on the other hand, had no time to work on his plan for the abolition of serfdom.

  Brandt quickly forgot all about the episode.

  But he would soon have reason to remember it.

  3.

  Autumn came late that year; the afternoons were quiet and everyone took walks, drank tea, and waited.

  A year earlier, during the previous late summer at the Ascheberg Gardens, everything had been so enchanting and new; now they tried to reconstruct that feeling. It was as if they tried to put a glass bell over the summer and Hirschholm. Out there in the darkness, in the Danish reality, they suspected that their enemies were multiplying. No, they knew it. Their enemies were more numerous than during the late summer at the Ascheberg Gardens, when innocence could still be found. Now they felt as if they were on stage, and the spotlight was slowly shrinking around them; the little family in the light, and all around them a darkness that they didn’t want to enter.

  The most important thing was the children. The boy was three years old, and Struensee put into practice all the theoretical principles of child rearing that he had previously formulated regarding health, natural attire, baths, outdoor life, and natural games. The little girl would soon follow, but she was still too young. She was endearing. The little girl was adorable. The little girl won everyone’s devotion. Yet the little girl had become—and everyone knew this, although no one spoke of it—the very focus for the Danish hatred of Struensee.

  The whore’s bastard. They had received reports. Everyone seemed to know.

  Struensee and the Queen often sat in the narrow strip of garden along the left flank of the woods, where garden furniture was set up and parasols provided shade. They could see a long way toward the park on the opposite side. One evening they were watching from a distance King Christian, who was always accompanied by Moranti and the dog; Christian was meandering along the opposite shore of the lake, busy toppling statues.

  That was the section of the garden where the statues stood. The statues were the constant objects of his anger or humor.

  They had tried to anchor the statues better by using ropes so that they couldn’t be toppled, but it did no good. It was pointless. They would prop them back up after the King’s vandalizing rampage, without even trying to repair the damage or broken pieces, disfigurements that occurred whenever the King was struck by melancholy.

  Struensee and the Queen sat there for a long time and, without a word, watched his battle with the statues.

  It was all very familiar by now.

  “We’re used to this,” Caroline Mathilde said, “but we can’t let anyone outside the court see him.”

  “Everyone knows, anyway.”

  “Everyone knows, but it shouldn’t be mentioned,” said Caroline Mathilde. “He’s ill. They say in Copenhagen that the Dowager Queen and Guldberg are planning to put him in an asylum. But that would be the end of both of us.”

  “The end?”

  “One day he topples God’s chosen statues. The next day he topples us.”

  “No, he won’t,” said Struensee. “But I’m nothing without Christian. If it gets out to the Danish people that God’s chosen one is nothing but a madman, then he will no longer be able to stretch his hand out to me and point and say: YOU! You will be my arm and my hand, and YOU will single-handedly and autocratically sign the decrees and laws. He transfers God’s choice to me. If he can’t do that, then the only thing left is …”

  “Death?”

  “Or flight.”

  “Rather death than flight,” the Queen said after a moment of silence.

  Loud laughter reached them from across the water. Moranti was now chasing the dog.

  “Such a beautiful country,” she said. “And such ugly people. Do we have any friends left?”

  “One or two,” replied Struensee. “One or two.”

  “Is he really a madman?” she asked.

  “No,” said Struensee. “But he’s not a person cast in one piece.”

  “How ghastly that sounds,” she said. “A person cast in one piece. Like a monument.”

  He didn’t answer. But then he said:

  “But are you?”

  She had started sitting with Struensee while he worked.

  At first Struensee thought it was him she wanted to be near. Later he realized that it was the work that interested her.

  He was supposed to explain what he was writing. At first he did so with a smile. Later, when he saw that her attitude was intently serious, he made a greater effort. One day she came to his room with a list of people she wanted to dismiss; at first he laughed. Then she explained. And he understood. It was not hatred or envy that lay behind the list. She had made an assessment of the power structure.

  Her analysis surprised him.

  He thought that her extremely lucid, extremely brutal view of the mechanisms of power had been born at the English court. No, she told him, I lived in a cloister. Then where had she learned all this? She was not one of those that Brandt scornfully used to call the “female schemers.” Struen
see understood that she saw a different kind of pattern than he did.

  The dream of the good society based on justice and reason was his. Her obsession was the instrument. It was the instrument’s handling of what she called “the great game.”

  Whenever she talked about the great game he would feel uneasy. He knew why that was. It was the tone from the discussions, back then, among the exceedingly brilliant men of the Enlightenment in Altona, when he realized that he was only a doctor, and kept silent.

  He listened, and once again kept silent.

  One evening she interrupted him as he was reading aloud from Holberg’s Moral Thoughts and told him that it was nothing but abstractions.

  That all those principles were true, but that he needed to understand the instrument. That he had to see the mechanisms, that he was naive. That his heart was much too pure. The pure-hearted were doomed to destruction. He hadn’t understood how to exploit the nobles. He must divide his enemies. Robbing the city of Copenhagen of its administrative independence was lunacy, and it created unnecessary enemies. He merely stared at her, surprised and silent. In her opinion the reforms had to be directed both against some things and for others. His decrees flowed from his pen, but they lacked any plan.

  He should choose his enemies, she said.

  He recognized the phrase. He had heard it before. He gave a start, and asked her whether she had been talking to Rantzau. “I recognize that phrase,” he said. “It didn’t come out of thin air.”

  “No,” she replied, “but perhaps he saw the same thing I did.”

  Struensee felt confused. Ambassador Keith from England had told Brandt that he knew quite well that “Her Majesty the Queen is now ruling absolutely through the Privy Cabinet Minister.” Brandt had passed this remark on. Was this a truth that he had suppressed? One day he issued a decree that the church on Amaliegade should be vacated and transformed into a women’s hospital, and he had hardly noticed that this was her suggestion. It was her suggestion, and he had formulated it, signed it, and believed it to be his own. But it was her suggestion.