ABSTRACT
Not all Goethe’s time during these months is devoted to literature and cultural development. There is still something of the ‘muffled-up’ boy in him. He has to get himself unmuffled; and just as in Leipzig, where, chameleon-like, he changed his style of dress, so now in Strasbourg he adapts himself to his surroundings. Strasbourg is not Paris, but neither is it ‘little Paris’, like Leipzig; it is the vestibule to Paris. At the university there is a large number of aristocrats from all over Europe. They have come to ‘perfect’ themselves before they can be allowed on the floor of the great metropolis, where every step, every gesture, every slightest trait is observed and ridiculed. Public bearing and appearance is still a matter of vital importance in an age when even a man’s entry into a room has to be performed like a minuet. A single clumsy, false move betrays the ‘peasant’, the ‘bourgeois’ or the ‘bear’, who has to be ‘licked into shape’, a saying derived from the old zoological notion of the newly born bear, which the mother had to lick into shape out of a formless lump of flesh.
