’But now, from the ground-floor windows, looking over the whole market-place, we had the endless tumult lying, as it were, palpable.  All sorts of walkers, soldiers in uniform, marauders, stout but sorrowing citizens and peasants, women and children, crushed and jostled each other, amid vehicles of all forms:  ammunition-wagons, baggage-wagons; carriages, single, double, and multiplex; such hundredfold miscellany of teams, requisitioned or lawfully owned, making way, hitting together, hindering each other, rolled here to right and to left.  Horned-cattle too were struggling on; probably herds that had been put in requisition.  Riders you saw few; but the elegant carriages of the Emigrants, many-coloured, lackered, gilt and silvered, evidently by the best builders, caught your eye. (See Hermann and Dorothea (also by Goethe), Buch Kalliope.)

’The crisis of the strait however arose further on a little; where the crowded market-place had to introduce itself into a street,—­straight indeed and good, but proportionably far too narrow.  I have, in my life, seen nothing like it:  the aspect of it might perhaps be compared to that of a swoln river which has been raging over meadows and fields, and is now again obliged to press itself through a narrow bridge, and flow on in its bounded channel.  Down the long street, all visible from our windows, there swelled continually the strangest tide:  a high double-seated travelling-coach towered visible over the flood of things.  We thought of the fair Frenchwomen we had seen in the morning.  It was not they, however, it was Count Haugwitz; him you could look at, with a kind of sardonic malice, rocking onwards, step by step, there.’  (Campagne in Frankreich, Goethe’s Werke (Stuttgart, 1829), xxx. 133-137.)

In such untriumphant Procession has the Brunswick Manifesto issued!  Nay in worse, ’in Negotiation with these miscreants,’—­the first news of which produced such a revulsion in the Emigrant nature, as put our scientific World-Poet ‘in fear for the wits of several.’  There is no help:  they must fare on, these poor Emigrants, angry with all persons and things, and making all persons angry, in the hapless course they struck into.  Landlord and landlady testify to you, at tables-d’hote, how insupportable these Frenchmen are:  how, in spite of such humiliation, of poverty and probable beggary, there is ever the same struggle for precedence, the same forwardness, and want of discretion.  High in honour, at the head of the table, you with your own eyes observe not a Seigneur but the automaton of a Seigneur, fallen into dotage; still worshipped, reverently waited on, and fed.  In miscellaneous seats, is a miscellany of soldiers, commissaries, adventurers; consuming silently their barbarian victuals.  ’On all brows is to be read a hard destiny; all are silent, for each has his own sufferings to bear, and looks forth into misery without bounds.’  One hasty wanderer, coming in, and eating without ungraciousness what is set before him, the landlord lets off almost scot-free.  “He is,” whispered the landlord to me, “the first of these cursed people I have seen condescend to taste our German black bread.” (Ibid. 152.) (Ibid. 210-12.)