ion auf immerdar--beyond the tomb and, in the
process, discovered elective affinities, the Wahlverwandtschaften of which
Goethe later told, relationships of choice that were also anarchistic.

The influence of France brooded over courts. At Versailles love strolled
on red heels through a minuet. In the grosser atmosphere of the German
Residenzen it kicked a chahut in sabots. In all the world there was but
one Versailles. In Germany there were a hundred imitations, gaunt, gilded,
hideous barracks where Louis Quatorze was aped. In one of them, at
Karlsruhe, the Margrave Karl Wilhelm peopled a Teuton Trianon with
nameless nymphs. In another, at Dresden, the Elector Augustus of Saxony
became the father of three hundred and fifty children. At Mannheim,
Bayreuth, Stuttgart, Brunswick, Darmstadt, license was such that the Court
of Charles the Second would have seemed by comparison puritan. Beyond
them, outside their gates and garden vistas, the people starved or, more
humanely, were whipped off in herds to fight and die on the Rhine and
Danube. But within, at the various Wilhelmshoehe and Ludwigslust, kinglets
danced with their Frauen. At Versailles it was to the air of Amaryllis
that the minuet was walked. In the German Residenzen it was to the odor of
schnapps that women chahuted.

The women lacked beauty. They lacked the grace of the Latin, the charm of
the Slav, the overgrown angel look of the English, the prettiness that the
American has achieved. But in girlhood generally they were endearing,
almost cloying, naturally constant and, when otherwise, made so by man and
the spectacle of court corruption.

European courts have always supplied the neighborhood with standards of
morals and manners. Those of eighteenth-century Germany were coarse. The
tone of society was similar. "Berlin," an observer wrote, "is a town
where, if fortis may be construed honest, there is neither vir fortis nec
foemina casta. The example of neglect of all moral and social duties
raised before the eyes of the people by the king show them vice too
advantageously.[71] In other words and in another tongue, similar remarks
were made of Hanover.[72] From there came George the First. After him
trooped his horrible Herrenhausen harem.

Since the departure of Charles the Second, London life had been relatively
genteel. Throughout the Georgian period it was the reverse. The memoirs of
the period echo still with shouts and laughter, with loud, loose talk,