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table!”
    “What if we come after you?”
    “Then I’ll spear you.”

    Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born May 5, 1813. He joined mother Anne (aged forty-five), father Michael (fifty-six), sisters Maren (sixteen), Nicoline (thirteen), and Petrea (eleven) and brothers Søren Michael (seven), Niels Andreas (five), and Peter Christian (four). They all lived at Number 2, Nytorv (“New Square”), a solid and respectable house for a solid and respectable family. No. 2 was a ten-minute walk from the school, and five minutes down from the Church of Our Lady. The spacious plaza out front hosted Copenhagen’s principal meat market and was full of the bustle and pageantry of city life. To the right were the offices of the city hall and high courts. To the left a pharmacy, and further up, the Gammeltorv (“Old Square”) with its famous fountain where patriotic townsfolk would float golden apples on the King’s birthday.
    What might the atmosphere of the Kierkegaard family have felt like? Like any family, the tone of the Kierkegaard home was created by the striking of a few notes in repetition.

    Number 2 Nytorv, the Kierkegaard family home. Søren occupied rooms on the second floor. The house was located next to the city hall and a five minutes’ walk away from the Church of Our Lady. The building was torn down at the beginning of the twentieth century.
    One such note was that of money. The Kierkegaards were comfortably well-off, their security overseen by a frugal and serious man who had acquired his wealth through a mixture of hard work, canny investments, and sheer good fortune. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard was born into a family of sheepherders in 1756. His family were bonded peasants, traditionally attached to church land in Sædling, a village on the moors of West Jutland (hence the name Kierkegaard , or “church yard”).
    When Michael was twelve years old he was sent to work for his uncle, a wool merchant in Copenhagen. The event saved the hardscrabble family another mouth to feed, just as it saved Michael from a life doomed to poverty. As a mark of his salvation he proudly kept amongst his possessions the document from the village priest releasing Michael from bonded servitude in 1777. In 1780 Michael obtained citizenship and five years later he set up shop with another hosier named Mads Røyen. The mercantile world of Copenhagen was highly regulated, and Mads and Michael had to fight in the courts for the right to sell all kinds of goods normally barred from merchants of their sphere. In 1788 Michael won another concession from the King, gaining Royal permission to deal in East Indian and Chinese textiles, and West Indian sugar, syrup, and coffee beans. Michael was fast becoming more than a humble hosier. In 1794 Michael married Mads’ sister, Kirstine Røyen. Kirstine died, childless, in 1796, as did Michael’s uncle, who left everything to him. Michael married again and began a family. For ten years Michael’s fortune seemed assured, but in 1807, world events caught up with the sleepy market town and its litigious merchants.
    Napoleon Bonaparte was striding across Europe. As part of his long war against England, Napoleon was seeking to close all European ports to British trade. For officially neutral Denmark, the pressure was mounting. The British, fearing Denmark’s prevarication and mistrustful of King Frederick VI’s ultimate allegiance, engaged in a controversial pre-emptive strike. In August 1807 the British Navy placed Copenhagen’s ports under embargo and demanded the surrender of the Danish fleet. No answer was forthcoming, and so the British Navy attacked, relishing the opportunity to try out their latest military technology—William Congreve’s rocket-propelled bombs. Copenhagen burned, many people died, and King Frederick was forced into a humiliating stand-down.
    The cost of rebuilding the city after the bombardment was expensive enough, but combined with punitive measures arising from the