Nearly four years had passed in the life of the dreamy youth. They had been turbulent, epoch-making years, years full of anguish and unabated fear. Napoleon’s armies had swept South as far as the Mediterranean and beyond, had also pushed their way East as far as the ancient capital of Russia, the whole world breathlessly awaiting the ultimate fate of the conqueror. For mingled with the fear of the invader was the conviction that no matter how heroic, he must meet with defeat in the end. When would the end come? The vanquished nations had hoped against hope, but finally beheld a sign from Heaven in the devouring flames of Moscow. A lull followed, the lull before an impeding storm. Spring had arrived, and with it came the nervous tension of prolonged suspense. Foreboding was in the air. The very elements foretold a terrific struggle. Westphalia and all of northern Germany was visited by devastating storms. On clear nights the superstitious saw in the heavens blood-red stars in the shape of besoms with long handles—the unerring omen of bloody battles! Everybody was certain that a gripping conflict between God and the devil was at hand, but no one knew on which side was God and on which the devil. But what did it all matter to Albert Zorn? Nero fiddled while Rome was burning; Goethe rhymed sweet lyrics and made love to Christiane Vulpius while the enemy was at the gates of Weimar; on the very day that the Battle of Jena was fought, Schlegel, the savant of Jena, unconcernedly dispatched a manuscript to his publisher. Albert was only thinking of his hero, the Emperor. Tears were in the boy’s eyes as he listened to the reports of the Emperor’s flight from the Russian steppes, mortification in his soul as he looked upon the foot-weary, wan, hollow-eyed, bedraggled forms of the straggling grenadiers, making their way home from the snowfields of Smolensk. However, even the stirring news of lost battles, the flying rumors of approaching clashes, the roar of death-dealing cannon, were to him mere tales of adventure romantically told. Spring had come, the sun was shining brilliantly, perfume was in the air, flowers were unfolding treasures of gold and silver and dazzling rubies, the buds were revealing depositories of emerald and opal and ermine, the nightingales were singing of love and passion and death—adolescence’s holy trinity—and the banks of the Rhine were re-echoing the mystic legends of bygone days. He had even failed to note the difference between his father’s brown coat with a sheen of genteel shabbiness and his own clothes of good quality and latest mode, and the disparity between his mother’s frocks, antedating the French occupation, and those of his sister in the fashion of the day.