Aber ohne zu schwoeren
ich unterstehe mich schon ein Maedgen zu verf--wie Teufel soll ich's
nennen. Enough, Monsieur, all this is but what you might have expected
from the aptest and most diligent of your scholars."[31] That all
this was not mere bravado is distinctly suggested even in _Dichtung
und Wahrheit_, where the wild doings of Leipzig are so decorously
draped.

[Footnote 29: _Ib._ p. 105.]

[Footnote 30: _Ib._ p. 116.]

[Footnote 31: _Ib._ p. 133.]

Goethe knew from the first that he could never make Kaethchen his wife,
and that sooner or later his lovemaking must come to an end. The end
came in the spring of 1768 after two years' philandering which had not
been all happiness. In a letter to Behrisch he thus relates the
_denouement_: "Oh, Behrisch," he writes, "I have begun to live! Could
I but tell you the whole story! I cannot; it would cost me too much.
Enough--we have separated, we are happy.... Behrisch, we are living in
the pleasantest, friendliest intercourse.... We began with love and we
end with friendship."[32] Goethe makes one of his characters say that
estranged lovers, if they only manage things well, may still remain
friends, and the remark was prompted by more than one experience of
his own.

[Footnote 32: _Ib._ pp. 158-9.]

When he was past his seventieth year, Goethe made a remark to his
friend, Chancellor von Mueller, which is applicable to every period of
his life: "In the hundred things which interest me," he said, "there
is always one which, as chief planet, holds the central place, and
meanwhile the remaining Quodlibet of my life circles round it in
many-changing phases, till each and all succeed in reaching the
centre." Even in these distracted Leipzig years the mental process
thus described is clearly visible. Neither Goethe's loves nor his
other dissipations ever permanently dulled the intellectual side of
his nature. While he was writing morbid letters to Behrisch, he was
directing the studies of his sister with all the seriousness of a
youthful pedagogue. Though he neglected the lectures of his
professors, he was assimilating knowledge on every subject that
appealed to his natural instincts. In truth, all the manifold
activities of his later years were foreshadowed during his sojourn in
Leipzig, as, indeed, they had already been foreshadowed during his
boyhood in Frankfort.

As in Frankfort, he took in knowledge equally from men, books, and
things.[33] In the house of a Leip