It established the fame of Jean Paul for his generation.  It brought women by swarms to his feet.  They were not discouraged there.  It was his platonic rule “never to sacrifice one love to another,” but to experiment with “simultaneous love,” “tutti love,” a “general warmth” of universal affection.  Intellectually awakened women were attracted possibly as much by Richter’s knowledge of their feelings as by the fascination of his personality. Hesperus lays bare many little wiles dear to feminine hearts, and contains some keenly sympathetic satire on German housewifery.

While still at work on Hesperus Jean Paul returned to his mother’s house at Hof.  “Richter’s study and sitting-room offered about this time,” says Doering, his first biographer, “a true and beautiful picture of his simple yet noble mind, which took in both high and low.  While his mother bustled about the housework at fire or table he sat in a corner of the same room at a plain writing-desk with few or no books at hand, but only one or two drawers with excerpts and manuscripts. * * * Pigeons fluttered in and out of the chamber.”

At Hof, Jean Paul continued to teach with originality and much success until 1796, when an invitation from Charlotte von Kalb to visit Weimar brought him new interests and connections.  Meanwhile, having finished Hesperus in July, 1794, he began work immediately on the genial Life of Quintus Fixlein, Based on Fifteen Little Boxes of Memoranda, an idyl, like Wuz, of the schoolhouse and the parsonage, reflecting Richter’s pedagogical interests and much of his personal experience.  Its satire of philological pedantry has not yet lost pertinence or pungency.  Quintus, ambitious of authorship, proposes to himself a catalogued interpretation of misprints in German books and other tasks hardly less laboriously futile.  His creator treats him with unfailing good humor and “the consciousness of a kindred folly.”  Fixlein is the archetypal pedant.  The very heart of humor is in the account of the commencement exercises at his school.  His little childishnesses are delightfully set forth; so, too, is his awe of aristocracy.  He always took off his hat before the windows of the manor house, even if he saw no one there.  The crown of it all is The Wedding.  The bridal pair’s visit to the graves of by-gone loves is a gem of fantasy.  But behind all the humor and satire must not be forgotten, in view of what was to follow, the undercurrent of courageous democratic protest which finds its keenest expression in the “Free Note” to Chapter Six. Fixlein appeared in 1796.

Richter’s next story, the unfinished Biographical Recreations under the Cranium of a Giantess, sprang immediately from a visit to Bayreuth in 1794 and his first introduction to aristocracy.  Its chief interest is in the enthusiastic welcome it extends to the French Revolution.  Intrinsically more important is the Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces which crowded the other subject from his mind and tells with much idyllic charm of “the marriage, life, death and wedding of F. H. Siebenkaes, Advocate of the Poor” (1796-7).