1852
“She Came Walking as if from the Lime Kiln”
In Copenhagen, moves from one apartment to another generally took place
on the third Tuesday in April or the third Tuesday in October. In this way,
furniture, servants, and other necessities could be where they needed to be
by May 1 or November 1, respectively. When people moved, they tended
to remain within the same neighborhood. Hans Christian Andersen lived
at fifteen different addresses in Copenhagen, but always near the Royal
Theater and Kongens Nytorv, which constituted a sort of focal point for
him. Kierkegaard always chose to live near the Church of Our Lady and
the old episcopal residence.
On moving day in April 1851 he made an exception, however, and
moved outside the city ramparts to Østerbrovej, where he installed himself
in a large, brand-new, suburban house, pleasantly situated with a view of
Sortedam Lake. The house, which was torn down in 1897, was surrounded
by gardens and truck farms, and the area generally had a rural character, as
can be seen from Christen Købke’s well-known picture, “Østerbro in
Morning Light” from 1836. There was room for two families on the ground
floor and for one family on the floor above, which was where Kierkegaard
moved in. The place had “an entrance and a view facing a pretty garden
and the lake,” as Kierkegaard’s nephew Carl Lund described it in a letter to
Peter Christian written in May of that year. Emil Boesen visited Kierkegaard
there a couple of times during the autumn and wrote to his wife Louise
back in Jutland that “Søren K.” had fine lodgings and that “he was his usual
self, behaving as he generally does.”
Kierkegaard left his lodgings every morning and walked the half-mile
into town. Later in the morning, the walk home would take him out of the
city via Nørreport to the path by the lake or to Farimagsgade, and it was
along this part of his walk that he often encountered Regine, who had
quietly left her apartment on Bredgade. No words were ever exchanged
during these encounters, but the once-engaged couple made up for the lack
of words with the frenetic use of an entire vocabulary of gestures that they
employed during the few palpitating seconds it took for them to pass each684