In his literary diaries Munch describes in detail his affair with "Mrs Heiberg", actually Millie Thaulow (née Ihlen), the daughter of an admiral and married to Carl Thaulow in the naval medical corps and Fritz Thaulow's brother. In his literary writings he refers to himself as "Brandt" and sometimes as "Nansen". He has just returned from a three-week stay in Paris in 1885 and takes the boat down to Borre to spend the summer with his family. He notices "Mrs Heiberg" as she is taking leave of her husband, "The Captain", and recalls spicy stories he has heard about her. At Drøbak she buys some cherries, offers him some and they get into conversation. It turns out that both of them are to spend the summer at Borre, not far from one another.

One day when he is strolling along the road she passes in a carriage, her lap full of yellow flowers. She stops the carriage and with sparkling laughter offers him a flower for each hand. He gradually becomes tormented by his obsession with this woman and loses all concentration, becoming nervous and restless. It develops into a love affair which continues in Christiania that autumn but by Christmas is over. He wanders the streeets of Christiania constantly thinking he sees "Mrs Heiberg", wonders whether she still loves him and vacillates between feeling hurt and annoyance that she is constantly in his thoughts. The vacilation between guilt and recrimination leads to frustration, vertigo and feelings of angst. Their affair marks him for years to come and the remembered images of these painful situations become the basis of a series of pictures which together would constitute his chief work.

When five years later in St. Cloud he hears that she has gone to Vienna with a singer in order to become a "cabaret singer", a procession of images passes in his mind's eye "a little faded, like the slides in a laterna magica". He imagines her "as a singer - through the thick tobacco smoke and all the top hats - With all the gestures I knew so well - such as when she pushed forward her shoulders and puffed out her chest - she smiled over one shoulder with that voluptuous smile of hers - giving the men a come hither look - waggling her hips", and he notes:

What a deep impression she has left on my mind - so much so that no other image can completely efface it -
...
Was it because she took my first kiss that she robbed me of the taste of life - Was it that she lied - deceived - that she one day suddenly shook the scales from my eyes so that I saw the medusa's head - saw life as unmitigated horror - saw that everything which had once had a rosy glow - now looked grey and empty

The images of love in Munch's Frieze of Life have their parallel in the literary texts which describe this, his first love affair. Therein lies its deepest secret. The core of the message is that the events of their brief affair are summoned up in memory and the suffering relived. His own first real experiences of love are portrayed with ruthless honesty, and he thus creates universal expressions of human feelings.

By the time Munch, eight years after the events occurred, sets out to transform them into pictures which became his life's work, he has of course created for himself a whole range of new experiences, experiences which, however, ultimately seem to confirm for him the portentous significance of the encounter with the first woman in his life.

Read the introductions to ANGST and DEATH.