There was a voice, a voice that no one had yet been familiar with seven weeks before, for it was not the voice of the Chamberlain. This voice was not that of Christoph Detlev. It was the voice of his death.

For many a day, Christoph Detlev's death had been living at Ulsgaard, talking to everyone and making demands – demanding to be carried, demanding the blue room or the little salon or the large drawing room, demanding the dogs, demanding laughter or talk or games or silence or all of it at once, demanding to see friends, women, people who were dead, demanding to die – making one demand after another, demanding and shouting.

For when night fell and the servants who were not in attendance, thoroughly worn out, tried to sleep, Christoph Detlev's death would shout out loud, and groan, and roar so long and uninterruptedly that the dogs, which began by howling too, fell silent and did not dare to lie down but remained standing on their long, slender, trembling legs, stricken with fear. And when the sound of that roar was heard in the village through the wide-open, silver Danish summer night, the people got up as they might in a thunderstorm, dressed and sat wordless around the lamp until it had passed. And women who were shortly to give birth were removed to the furthermost rooms, to beds in alcoves far from hearing; yet still they heard it, heard it as though the roaring were within their own bodies, and they begged to be allowed to get up as well, and came white and great with child to sit with the others with their smudged-out faces. And the cows that were calving at the time were helpless, and their young stillborn, and one calf had to be plucked forth dead, together with all the mother's entrails, when it absolutely would not come. And all the labourers did their work poorly, clean forgetting to bring in the hay because all day long they went in fear of the night, for the rising in terror and the long hours of waking had left them so exhausted that their thoughts were quite scattered. And on Sunday, when they went to the peaceful white church, they prayed for an end to lords of the Ulsgaard manor: for this one was a terrible master. And the minister voiced aloud from the pulpit what was in the thoughts and prayers of them all, for he too no longer enjoyed a night's rest, and had ceased to understand God. And the bell said it too, having found a fearsome rival who roared all night, a rival against whom it was powerless, even when the full weight of its metal was in its pealing. In fact, everyone said it; and one of the youngsters had dreamed he went to the manor and killed their lord and master with a pitchfork; and the others were so tense, worn out and agitated that they all listened attentively as he recounted his dream, speculating unconsciously whether he might in fact be up to doing the deed. And this was how people felt and spoke in the entire district, where only weeks before the Chamberlain had been held in such affection and compassion. But despite the talk, nothing changed. Christoph Detlev's death was installed at Ulsgaard and would not be hurried. It had come for a ten-week stay, and stay it did; and for the duration of that time it was more completely the lord and master than Christoph Detlev had ever been, like a king known for ever to history as ‘the Terrible’.

It was not the death of some wretch dying of a dropsy; it was the evil, regal death the Chamberlain had borne with him his whole life long, nurturing it from within himself. All those vast resources of pride and will and mastery that he had been unable to use up himself in his calmer days had passed over now into his death, into that death which now presided at Ulsgaard, throwing it all away.

Chamberlain Brigge would have given short shrift to anyone who had suggested he die some other death rather than this one. He died his terrible death.

[9] And if I think of others whose deaths I have witnessed or heard of, it is always the same: they have all died their own deaths. Those men who carried their death inside their armour, like a prisoner; those women who grew very old, and tiny, and then departed this life discreetly and magisterially, in an immense bed, as if on a stage, in the presence of their whole family, the servants and the dogs. Even the children, the very young ones too, did not die simply any child's death, but summoned up all their command and gave death to what they already were and what they would have been.

And what a rueful beauty was lent the women at times when they were pregnant and stood, hands involuntarily resting on their large bellies, in which there was a twofold fruit: a child, and a death. Did not the replete, almost nourishing smile on their faces, free of all else, come from their intermittent notion that both were growing?

[10] I have been doing something to ward off fear. I have sat up all night writing, and now I am as tired out as if I had taken a long walk through the Ulsgaard fields. The thought that all of that is no more and that strangers are living in the rambling old manor house is difficult to grasp. Perhaps at this very moment the maids are asleep in the white room under the gable, sleeping their heavy, moist slumbers from evening till morn.

And one has no one and nothing oneself, and one travels the world with a suitcase and a box of books and, when all's said and done, no curiosity at all. What kind of life is it, with neither house nor inherited things nor dogs? If only one had one's memories, at least. But then, who does? If only one had one's childhood – but it is as if it were buried deep. Perhaps one has to be old to have access to all of this. I suspect it may be good to be old.

[11] Today's was a fine autumn morning. I strolled through the Tuileries. Everything to the east, before the sun, was dazzling; but where the sunlight fell, the mist still hung like a grey curtain of light. Grey amid the grey, the statues took the sun in gardens still draped.