This
will be of great advantage to my purse."[30] Very different is the
picture of his mode of life in his subsequent letters to Behrisch at
the same period. If we are to take him literally, it was the life of a
veritable Don Juan who had learned all the lessons of his instructor.
"Do you recognise me in this tone, Behrisch?" he writes; "it is the
tone of a conquering young lord.... It is comic. 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.
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