and-out psychopath, utterly devoid of self-restraint .He had participated in
parties and celebrations of every description and on a number of occasions
had been captain of the popinjay at the shooting range; he was such a jolly
fellow and man of the people that when the university students had wanted
to sail to Stockholm, he lent them a warship .He had never been able to
find satisfaction in any of the royal marriages that people tried to arrange
for him every so often, and he ended up falling in love with a former ballet
dancer, Louise Rasmussen, who made a living as a milliner .She had a shop
on Vimmelskaftet with a mechanical wax mannequin in the window—but
now she suddenly had to take on the role of Countess Danner.
Regine Schlegel
The next time Kierkegaard went to Lyngby, November 3, 1847, it had noth-
ing to do with royalty but was simply to get away from Copenhagen .For
on that day Regine Olsen was married to Frederik Schlegel at the Church
of Our Savior out in Christianshavn—and had thereby definitively broken
the pact Kierkegaard thought they had made with each other .“Invoking a
curious sort of freemasonry, I can make these words of the poet into a motto
for a portion of my life’s sufferings / Infandum me jubesReginarenovare
dolorem,” he wrote in his journal .Kierkegaard was citing the poet Virgil,
and the words from theAeneidmean, “You command, Regina, that I must
renew an unspeakable suffering.” Kierkegaard went on, more in bitterness
than in relief: “The girl has caused me troubles enough .And now she is—
not dead—but happily and well married .Six years ago today I said as much—
and was called the most dastardly of all dastardly villains .Remarkable .”
A bit over a month earlier, on September 29, Kierkegaard had published
Works of Love, in which he described the phenomenon of “covetousness,”
which in his vocabulary is the word for envy or jealousy .“Immediate love
can be transformedwithin itself; by means of spontaneous combustion it can
becomecovetousness... .The covetous person does not hate the object of
love, by no means, but he tortures himself over the fire of reciprocal love,
which ought to have a cathartic effect and purify his love .Almost importu-
nately, the covetous person gathers every ray of love from the beloved per-
son, but with the burning glass of his covetousness he focuses all these rays
upon his own love, and he slowly burns up.” We might think that Kierke-
gaard wrote these lines on the basis of his own painful experience, but two
years later, when he once again touched on his “relation to her,” he was
amazed by his own “objectivity” with respect to Regine and to “him,” the
other fellow: “Schlegel is surely a likable man .I really think she feels quite