Mrs. Schlegel was loyal and lovable to the last, happy to have been taken
into history. Therefore, the question of how thingsactuallywent during
the thirteen months it took the engagement to unravel was something she
took with her to her grave. Or perhaps she had told what she had to tell.
Seen through her eyes, perhaps there actually was nothing more. In any
case, none of the frequent visitors and diligent note takers—neither Mssrs.
Meyer and Neiiendam, nor Hanne Mourier, not to mention Henriette
Lund—seem to have elicited the mystery from this mysterious widow. De-
spite the fact that, accordin gto Julius Clausen, she eventually stopped
speakin g“of Schle gel, but only of Kierke gaard,” she contributed no new
chapters to the story.
And then senility swallowed up the last remnants. “Aren’t you the one I
gave that ring to, the one I got from Søren?” an aging, somewhat disori-
ented Regine asked Julius Clausen one day. He was compelled to reply,
“Unfortunately not.”
Miss O.
Regine Schlegel’s depiction of Kierkegaard’s courtship does not in fact dif-
fer essentially from Kierkegaard’s own version, except that his is better,
which is why he will be permitted to recount it here. The account comes
from a lengthy journal entry, or rather a whole little series of entries, which
he jotted down on August 24, 1849, and titled “My Relation to ‘Her.’ ”
Despite the fact that the main entry was provided with stage directions
designating it as “somewhat poetic,” it adheres to events in such a matter-
of-fact reportin gstyle, almost like a series of tele grams, that the term “po-
etic” can hardly mean that the facts have been altered poetically, but more
likely that portions of the truth have been omitted, passed over in silence,
repressed. Or perhaps the account is indeed so close to the truth that Kier-
kegaard was afraid of having revealed too much that was private and there-
fore encrypted the text by labelin git deceptively as “somewhat poetic.”
However all that may be: “The 8th of September I left home with the firm
intention of decidin gthe entire matter. We met in the street just outside
their house. She said that there was no one home. I was foolhardy enough
to understand these words as the invitation I needed. I went into the house
with her. We stood alone in the parlor. She was a bit uneasy. I asked her
to play a little for me on the piano, as she usually did. She did so, but it
didn’t help me. Then I suddenly took the music book, closed it, not without
a certain vehemence, tossed it off the piano and said, ‘Oh, what do I care
about music? It’s you I’m lookin gfor, you I’ve been seekin gfor two years.’