politeness. But when they met again after many years, he a famous poet and she a middle-aged matron, he instinctively adopted the "Du" (thou) of affectionate intimacy, and she responded in kind. He asked her whether she had recognised herself in any of his works, and she replied: "I really don't know, unless it be in the parson's wife in Love's Comedy, with her eight children and her perpetual knitting." "Ibsen protested," says Herr Paulsen, in whose Samliv med Ibsen a full account of the episode may be read. It is interesting to note that the lady did not recognise herself in Eline Gyldenlöve, any more than we can.
It must have been less than a year after the production of Lady Inger that Ibsen made the acquaintance of the lady who was to be his wife. Susanna Dåe Thoresen was a daughter (by his second marriage) of Provost[1] Thoresen, of Bergen, whose third wife, Magdalene Krag, afterwards became an authoress of some celebrity. It is recorded that Ibsen's first visit to the Thoresen household took place on January 7, 1856,[2] and that on that occasion, speaking to Susanna Thoresen, he was suddenly moved to say to her: "You are now Elina, but in time you will become Lady Inger." Twenty years later, at
- ↑ Provost ("Provst") is an ecclesiastical title, roughly equivalent to Dean.
- ↑ See article by Dr. Julius Elias in Die neue Rundschau, December 1906, p. 1463. Dr. Brahm, in the same magazine (p. 1414), writes as though this were Ibsen's first meeting with his wife; and a note by Halvdan Koht, in the Norwegian edition of Ibsen's Letters, seems to bear out this view. But it would appear that what Fru Ibsen told Dr. Elias was that on the date mentioned Ibsen for "the first time visited at her father's house." The terms of the anecdote almost compel us to assume that he had previously met her elsewhere. It seems almost inconceivable that Ibsen, of all people, should have made such a speech to a lady on their very first meeting.
