Soren Kierkegaard

out at regular intervals, and it could stink. “In many places, ”Dr. Horne-
mann wrote, “I have found cellars, entryways, and stairways well up in the
house, filled with the most disgusting stench from these sumps, especially
while the pumping is in progress. I will mention only one of the problems
this entails: In almost every case, these cellar sumps are accompanied by the
presence of a particular species of slug, often found in large numbers in the
lower portions of the building, that deposits on the woodwork, on food,
and on whatever else they crawl, the slime they secrete.”
The city’s latrines are a chapter unto themselves, and a rather delicate
one. They were constructed in accordance with the old digging-out system;
that is, the excrement was dug out and collected in large cellars or depres-
sions in the ground, which had room for quite a number of loads, so that
one could get by with emptying them only once or twice a year. The
emptying was carried out by so-called nightmen who, as the title implies,
were only permitted to empty the latrines at night and in accordance with
very specific rules. These rules were continually disobeyed, however, and
an 1854 police report tells of nightmen improperly transporting their loads
at a gallop! The night soil was transported over the Knippelsbro, through
Christianshavn, then out to Amager to the disposal pits that were established
there in 1777 and have been in use ever since.
The nightmen earned a good wage, so people often tried to get rid of
their night soil in other ways. They could of course simply dump it in the
gutter or pitch it into the cellar sump—so much forthatpot! If they lived
near a canal or a moat, it was almost too obvious what to do. The moat
around Rosenborg Castle, which had neither inlet or outlet and was only
a stone’s throw from Kierkegaard’s apartment in Rosenborggade, thus grad-
ually became a four-sided disposal pit because all the night soil and waste
water from the guards’ barracks ran directly into the moat, as did the runoff
from the cow stall that was a part of the commandant’s quarters.
And while all this stuff stank, that was not the worst: It alsosank, thereby
coming into contact with the city’s drinking water that reached the town
through long wooden conduits, usually buried several meters deep. The
best water was called “spring water ”(despite the fact that it did not spring
forth, but like everything else had to be carried up into the house) and came
from Emdrup Lake outside the city, while ordinary “pump water ”came
from lakes within the boundaries of the city. By the time the water reached
its destination it had been under way so long that its quality had fallen
drastically. As a rule, somewhere or other along the way the wooden con-
duit would have rotted, and at points the conduits lay close to leaky night
soil pits, sometimes running right through them. Not infrequently dead fish
were pumped out with the water—or live leeches, toads, and eels. If one