THE GOETHE HOUSE AT FRANKFORT. 117 
of a Chinese pattern. Hardly had the old 
Rath got them furnished to his mind when 
the Seven Years’ War broke out; Frankfort 
was occupied by the French, and the Count 
Thorane from Provence was billeted upon 
him. The Count, a well-bred and highly 
cultivated nobleman, did everything in his 
power to make his presence as little burden- 
some as possible, and even refrained from 
hanging up his maps on the Chinese wall- 
paper. The friends of the family were 
never wearied in dwelling on the Herr 
Rath’s good fortune that so gentlemanly an 
occupant had fallen to his lot. But the 
Herr Rath would listen to no palliative sug- 
gestions ; he was almost beside himself with 
rage at seeing his best rooms, the apple of 
his eye, seized upon by strangers and ene- 
mies; and, added to this, he was so fierce 
a partisan for “ Old Fritz,” that during the 
whole time of the Count’s stay, which ex- 
tended to about three years. Rath Goethe 
went about with a thorn in his flesh, and on 
one occasion gave vent to his long pent-up 
wrath in such terms that only the urgent 
intercessions of his wife and friends saved 
him from immediate arrest. The mother 
and children were at once on the best of 
terms with the Count, who often sent the 
children cake and ices firom his table ; but 
the ices, to the children’s great distress, the 
mother always threw out of the window, de- 
claring, in her honest simplicity, that she 
did not believe the human stomach could 
digest ice, be it ever so much sweetened. 
Goethe dwells at some length on this very 
important period of his boyhood, and the 
influences upon his own growth and devel- 
opment which arose from Count Thorane’s 
residence in his father’s house. 
The rooms which the Count occupied 
consist of one large central drawing-room 
having four windows to the street, with 
rooms opening out of it on each side ; that 
on the left having two windows, and the 
smaller one on the right but one. The 
Count was subject to fits of dejection or 
hypochondria, at which times he would re- 
tire for days and see no one but his servant. 
He filled the post of Lieutenant du Roi, a 
sort of Judge- Advocate, whose business it 
was to decide upon all cases of strife arising 
between soldiers or between soldiers and 
citizens ; but when his hypochondria seized 
him, not the most urgent cases could draw 
him from the little one-windowed nest to 
the right of the drawing-room, which he had 
chosen for his ‘^growlery.” The family 
learned from the servant’s gossip that the 
Count once, when this fit was on him, had 
given what he afterward thought a very un- 
righteous decision, and hence his determi- 
nation to retire entirely at such seasons from 
all participation in human affairs. 
Passing up the stairs from the second to 
the third floor, we notice the monograms 
J. C. G., C. E. G., in the wrought-iron stair 
railing. We cross the cheerful antechamber 
and come to the apartments which the 
family occupied. The division of the rooms 
is slightly different from that on the floor 
below, the central room being smaller, with 
but three windows, the side rooms having 
each two. The central room was the family 
drawing-room ; here, as has been mentioned, 
all the pictures were hung after the rebuild- 
ing, hence it was usually called the pict- 
ure-room.” Count Thorane, a great lover 
of art, hearing the picture-room spoken of 
on the night of his arrival, insisted upon 
seeing it at once, and went over each pict- 
ure with a candle in his hand. To the left 
of the picture-room was the Herr Rath’s 
library, study, and special sanctum. Be- 
sides its two front windows it has a little 
window in the side wall, giving a good view 
up the street. A f^w lines in the Autobiog- 
raphy explain its use. “ I slipped home,” 
Goethe writes, “ by a roundabout way, for 
on the side toward the kleiner Hirsch^a- 
ben my father, not without the opposition 
of his neighbor, had had a small guckfenster 
(peep-hole) made in the wall ; this side we 
avoided when we did not wish him to see 
us coming home.” To the right of the pict- 
ure-room was the Frau Rath’s sitting-room, 
and behind and communicating with it, 
looking toward the court, the parents’ bed- 
room, — the room in which the poet was 
bom, — and in the wing, still further in the 
rear, the children’s bedroom. 
On the fourth floor we come to the Man- 
sard rooms, — the poet’s rooms, — which re- 
quire a few words of preface. From the 
time of its sale in 1795 by Goethe’s mother' 
until the death of the poet in 1832, the 
Goethe house seems to have been little 
thought of. But the renewed interest in a 
great man’s history which is always awak- 
ened by his death, brought again into notice 
the house in which Goethe was born. 
The Roessing family, in whose possession it 
was, were at first very much astonished at 
the frequent applications to see the house. 
The first one occurred in the year after 
Goethe’s death, and, from that time, the 
number of visitors increased day by day. 
There is on the fourth floor a small attic 
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Missouri 
Botanical 
Garden 
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