What attracted me in my uncle most strongly was his blunt contempt of the modern pedantry in State, Church, and School, to which he gave vent with some humour.  Despite the great moderation of his usual views on life, he yet produced on me the effect of a thorough free-thinker.  I was highly delighted by his contempt for the pedantry of the schools.  Once, when I had come into serious conflict with all the teachers of the Nicolai School, and the rector of the school had approached my uncle, as the only male representative of my family, with a serious complaint about my behaviour, my uncle asked me during a stroll round the town, with a calm smile as though he were speaking to one of his own age, what I had been up to with the people at school.  I explained the whole affair to him, and described the punishment to which I had been subjected, and which seemed to me unjust.  He pacified me, and exhorted me to be patient, telling me to comfort myself with the Spanish proverb, un rey no puede morir, which he explained as meaning that the ruler of a school must of necessity always be in the right.

He could not, of course, help noticing, to his alarm, the effect upon me of this kind of conversation, which I was far too young to appreciate.  Although it annoyed me one day, when I wanted to begin reading Goethe’s Faust, to hear him say quietly that I was too young to understand it, yet, according to my thinking, his other conversations about our own great poets, and even about Shakespeare and Dante, had made me so familiar with these sublime figures that I had now for some time been secretly busy working out the great tragedy I had already conceived in Dresden.  Since my trouble at school I had devoted all my energies, which ought by rights to have been exclusively directed to my school duties, to the accomplishment of this task.  In this secret work I had only one confidante, my sister Ottilie, who now lived with me at my mother’s.  I can remember the misgivings and alarm which the first confidential communication of my great poetic enterprise aroused in my good sister; yet she affectionately suffered the tortures I sometimes inflicted on her by reciting to her in secret, but not without emotion, portions of my work as it progressed.  Once, when I was reciting to her one of the most gruesome scenes, a heavy thunderstorm came on.  When the lightning flashed quite close to us, and the thunder rolled, my sister felt bound to implore me to stop; but she soon found it was hopeless, and continued to endure it with touching devotion.

But a more significant storm was brewing on the horizon of my life.  My neglect of school reached such a point that it could not but lead to a rupture.  Whilst my dear mother had no presentiment of this, I awaited the catastrophe with longing rather than with fear.