ABSTRACT
It is as a small ‘muffled up’ boy, to use his own expression, that, in October 1765, the 16-year-old Goethe travels to Leipzig, to study law at his father’s wish. He travels in the company of a publisher named Fleischer, a symbolic companion indeed, at a bad time of year and on ‘wicked roads of which everyone had a tale to tell’. The German roads are frightful and long remain so, in the Duchy of Weimar as well. In Auerstadt, on the future battlefield of Napoleon’s great victory over the Prussians, the carriage sticks. Night is falling and no one comes to their aid, so the delicate youth has to put his shoulder to the wheel, and in doing so strains the ligaments in his chest, a condition that is to trouble him for many years to come. In an abandoned quarry, countless lights are twinkling in the night; these ‘by no means remained stationary but jumped to and fro. ... Whether this was a pandemonium of will-o-the-wisps or a company of luminant beings, I shall not attempt to decide’, wrote the poet long afterwards, when he had already written Faust.
