166 Kant: A Biographyespecially the "winding of the clock" has reference to the opening scene
of Tristram Shandy, which deals with Tristram's conception. Yet even if
the winding of the clock may have sexual overtones, the allusion was prob¬
ably more an expression of literary playfulness than it was an invitation to
deceive her husband. In fact, Kant was probably closer to Johann Konrad
Jacobi than he was to her. Jacobi was a very educated person in his own
way, being able to correspond with businesses abroad in five languages.^90
They would have shared many more interests with one another than with
the young Maria Charlotta. She was twenty-two years younger than her hus¬
band, and fifteen years younger than Kant.
Kant and Maria Charlotta were friendly with each other, but she ap¬
pears to have been more interested in him than he was interested in her. At
the beginning of 1766, when Maria Charlotta, known to everyone simply
as "the Princess," was in Berlin to cure a problem with her eyes, she re¬
sponded to a letter by Kant. In it, she alluded to many evenings that Kant,
Goeschen, and Jacobi had shared during her absence, and she assured
Kant that her husband's well-being was the only thing that gave her satis¬
faction, mockingly scolding Kant for not being willing to accompany her on
the voyage home.^91
Königsberg at that time had a lively theater culture, and Kant and his
friends took part in it. Though there was no standing ensemble, it did have
a theater building with three hundred seats. Goeschen, Jacobi, Hippel, and
Kant often went together to the theater, where Jacobi and Goeschen had
rented a booth. Some of the plays they would have attended were: Voltaire's
Zaire, Coffeehouse, and Alzire, Weiße's Haushälterin, Candidates, and Crispus,
Goldoni's Pamela, or the Rewarded Virtue and The Cavalier and the Dame,
Moliere's Miser, and Lessing's Miss Sarah Sampson. They must have seen
Hippel's Man of the Clock and Servant and Master, and they attended many
others that were popular at the time. The Königsbergische gelehrte und poli¬
tische Anzeigen published reviews of most of them, and many appear to have
been written by Hippel. These performances helped shape Kant's intel¬
lectual outlook in general and perhaps some of his particular philosophical
views as well.
Voltaire's Coffeehouse, for instance, was, as the reviewer notes, baptized
"a translation of Hume," and it represented for him the greatest compli¬
ment to the English that anyone could pay them. Both the titles of the plays
and the reviews show that Königsberg was by no means a cultural back¬
water but actively participated in the developments of the time. The re¬
viewers were not always complimentary to the actors, and Lauson, the poet