So long as it depended on himself, he had only gone on making blunders, and what was extraordinary in him had only come to light when he was compelled to make these blunders good again.  It was purely from this that he had obtained his great reputation; since every man wishes for himself that same talent of making good, in a clever way, the blunders which he frequently commits.  If one goes through the Seven Years’ War, step by step, it will be found that the king quite uselessly sacrificed his fine army, and that it was his own fault that this ruinous feud had been protracted to so great a length.  A truly great man and general would have got the better of his enemies much sooner.”  In support of these opinions they could cite infinite details, which I did not know how to deny; and I felt the unbounded reverence which I had devoted to this remarkable prince, from my youth upwards, gradually cooling away.

As the inhabitants of Leipzig had now destroyed for me the pleasant feeling of revering a great man; so did a new friend, whom I gained at the time, very much diminish the respect which I entertained for my present fellow-citizens.  This friend was one of the strangest fellows in the world.  He was named Behrisch, and was tutor to the young Count Lindenau.  Even his exterior was singular enough.  Lean and well-built, far advanced in the thirties, a very large nose, and altogether marked features:  he wore from morning till night a scratch which might well have been called a peruke, but dressed himself very neatly, and never went out but with his sword by his side, and his hat under his arm.  He was one of those men who have quite a peculiar gift of killing time, or, rather, who know how to make something out of nothing, in order to pass time away.  Every thing he did had to be done with slowness, and with a certain deportment which might have been called affected if Behrisch had not even by nature had something affected in his manner.  He resembled an old Frenchman, and also spoke and wrote French very well and easily.  His greatest delight was to busy himself seriously about drolleries, and to follow up without end any silly notion.  Thus he was constantly dressed in gray; and as the different parts of his attire were of different material, and also of different shades, he could reflect for whole days as to how he should procure one gray more for his body, and was happy when he had succeeded in this, and could put to shame us who had doubted it, or had pronounced it impossible.  He then gave us long, severe lectures about our lack of inventive power, and our want of faith in his talents.