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Lotte, was really, though not formally, engaged to Kestner, a man of two-and-thirty, secretary to the Hanoverian legation. The discovery of this relation made no difference to Goethe; he remained the devoted friend to both. But the position was too critical to last. On September 10 they met in the German house for the last time. Goethe and Schlosser went together to Wetzlar in November.
It was during this period that he made the acquaintance of Charlotte Buff, the heroine of the "Sorrows of Werther," from whom he finally tore himself away, leaving Wetzlar when he discovered that their growing interest in each other was endangering her relation with Kestner, her betrothed. It came about by no fault of his.
The subsidies which the French Crown was foolish enough to pay him for a perfectly useless service did not suffice for his extravagant expenses. He loaded his subjects with taxes till the patient people could bear it no longer, and some years after had recourse to the Diet of Wetzlar, which obliged him to change his system.
Most of those articles were delivered in kind, and what were not used were set up to auction, converted into ready money, and divided among the plunderers. In 1797, General Ney had the command in the vicinity of the free and Imperial city of Wetzlar.
It was apparently prescience of the fact that the greatest laurels were still to be won which led him to refuse, and return to his headquarters at Wetzlar. There a mysterious malady, still attributed by many to poison, ended his brief and glorious career on September eighteenth, 1797. His laurels were such as adorn only a character full of promise, serene and generous alike in success and defeat.
Every personage is made to live; they speak in short, sharp sentences like the powerful lines of a great master's drawing. The first sketch of Goetz was finished in six weeks, in the autumn of 1771. It ran like wild-fire through the whole of Germany. Goethe left Frankfort in the spring of 1772 for Wetzlar, a quiet country town on the Lahn, one of the seats of government of the Holy Roman Empire.
No longer did the Count of Limburg-Styrum parade his army of one colonel, six officers, and two privates in the valley of the Roehr: he and his passed under the sway of Murat, and the lapse of these pigmy forces made a national army possible in the dim future. No more did the Imperial lawyers at Wetzlar browse on evergreen lawsuits: justice was administered after the concise methods of Napoleon.
Wrangel, however, did not await him, but hastened through Upper Saxony to the Weser, where he took Hoester and Paderborn. From thence he marched into Hesse, in order to join Turenne, and at his camp at Wetzlar, was joined by the flying corps of Koenigsmark.
At Wetzlar, one of the stations near Giessen, a kind-faced old German came to the window and talked to us in splendid English. "I would like to give you something, boys," he said, "but" he shrugged his shoulders "you know I daren't." The guard pretended not to hear a word, and at that moment was waving his hand to a group of girls just the regular station-goers, who meet the trains in Canada.
On the 6th he started by daybreak; relays of horses were in waiting along the road to Wetzlar, and with all speed he hastened forward to Bamberg, where he issued his grand proclamation to the army.
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