Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 4.djvu/441

Rh ministers, about the court and court favourites. These were new subjects for my love of instructing myself, and very welcome ones to my pertness and youthful conceit. I observed everything accurately, noted it down industriously; and I now see, from the little that is left, that such accounts, although only put together on the moment, out of fables and uncertain general rumours, always have a certain value in after times, because they serve to confront and compare the secret made known at last with what was then already discovered and public, and the judgments of contemporaries, true or false, with the convictions of posterity.

Striking, and daily before the eyes of us street-loungers, was the project for beautifying the city; the execution of which, according to draughts and plans, began in the strangest fashion to pass from sketches and plans into reality. Intendant Gayot had undertaken to new-model the angular and uneven lanes of Strasburg, and to lay the foundations of a respectable, handsome city, regulated by line and level. Upon this, Blondel, a Parisian architect, drew a plan, by which a hundred and forty householders gained in room, eighty lost, and the rest remained in their former condition. This plan accepted, but not to be put into execution at once, now, should in course of time have been approaching completion; and, meanwhile, the city oddly enough wavered between form and formlessness. If, for instance, a crooked side of a street was to be straightened, the first man who felt disposed to build moved forward to the appointed line, perhaps, too, his next neighbour, but perhaps, also, the third or fourth resident from him; by which projections the most awkward recesses were left, like front courtyards, before the houses in the background. They would not use force, yet without compulsion they would never have got on: on which account no man, when his house was once condemned, ventured to improve or replace anything that related