A Fortunate Man

Peter Sedenius gets accepted into an engineering university. He can leave rural Denmark for Copenhagen and he can break ties with his overbearing pious father. He hates his father and he rejects a gift of his father's pocket watch. The self-confident Peter, free of family and Christian religion, is poor but studies hard. He befriends a waitress who teaches him the ways of the city and the world of sex.

Peter meets Ivan and his father Phillip Salomon from a wealthy Jewish banking family. Ivan likes the ambitious smart engineer and especially likes Peter's grand future project to harness water and wind power to develop the country with electricity. It is the late 19th Century and his ideas are new and revolutionary. Ivan helps Peter adjust to free thinking intellectuals, new political thought, monied class businessmen, cultural rules and expectations and the Salomon family with daughter, Jakobe. She is to thought to marry Eybert, a little older, wealthy, and established Jewish man. Peter is a young student with no money from a Christian family no one has yet met. Nonetheless Peter is welcomed into the Salomon family circle even vacationing with them. They like his visionary energy project to which Peter is quite proud and his youthful ambition sees no obstacles.