at the grave himself, walked away, his large face bearing an expression of
annoyance. It was a source of some amusement when a slightly drunk fellow
shouted to one of his comrades, “Let’s go home, then, Chrishan!” And they
did, Chrishan and the others went home; nothing else was going to happen
in the cemetery that day.
Troels Frederik could remember that he had run across “the trampled
grave sites” and finally reached the carriage where his father and Peter
Christian were sitting. Only when he was inside the carriage at last did he
realize how terribly cold he was.
The Will, the Auctions, and a Psychopathic Missionary
After the funeral and the burial, the newspapers passed their judgments,
ranging from exaggerated condemnation to neutral versions of events to
striking stupidity. Naturally, Peter Christian was also mentioned, but he
refused to speak out in connection with the matter. “In my internal struggle,
I ignored the views of the newspapers,” the sorely tried man wrote in his
diary, in which an entry from December 1855 anticipated the coming dark-
ness. He wrote merely, “Despair and loneliness.”
Others despaired somewhat less and knew how to inflate their spirit-
lessness into a hollow pathos, thus helping to prove the deceased correct in
his prophecy that after his death he would be praised as much as he had
been despised while alive. More or less undocumented stories began to
circulate. Thus,Morgenposteninformed its readers that “it is said that” the
deceased had supposedly “willed his great fortune to the poor,” and that his
“last wish” had been that he bear no “other grave garments than the linen
he was wearing at the time of his death, plus a sheet.” Supposedly, the only
“ornament” he took with him in his coffin was a “breast cloth of white satin
upon which a woman had embroidered blossoms of everlasting, forming an
inscription that said ‘The Only Truthful One.’” From Stockholm, Fredrika
Bremer wrote to Hans Christian Andersen, “With S. Kierkegaard, I say,
God’s will be done. Would that we might have a sense of assurance that we
are following His exhortation and carrying out His commandment to us!”
Andersen informed August Bournonville in a letter dated November 24,
1855, about Henrik Lund’s scandalous behavior at the grave: “He de-
clared—this was the point, more or less—that Søren Kierkegaard had re-
signed from our society.” And on February 8, 1856, Andersen sent Hen-
riette Wulff the latest news ofl’affaireKierkegaard: “Professor Rasmus