i lie v^iu iviaii 307than at any prior time in his life. He still got up at 5:00 A.M., drank a little
tea, smoked his pipe, "and then sat down at his working table until shortly
before 1:00 P.M." If we can believe his own complaints, he could not have
worked the entire time, since he found extended intellectual exertion dif¬
ficult. After work, he got dressed for dinner. Dinner lasted from 1 :oo to
3:00, often longer. During this period, he usually invited two guests. Im¬
mediately after dinner, he went on his daily walk for about an hour. In bad
weather, his servant Lampe accompanied him. Coming back, he took care
of domestic affairs and read his papers and magazines. Before going to bed
at 10:00 P.M., he thought about his writings, making notes on small pieces
of paper.^4
Most of his old friends either were dead or were to die during this
period. On April 23,1796, Hippel, one of his most frequent dinner guests
and the closest and most original of his surviving friends, suddenly died af¬
ter a short illness.^5 He was just fifty-five years old. His death raised a num¬
ber of questions. He was a highly respected public figure, but he had lived
two lives, of which only one was known. Hardly anyone knew that he had
published a great number of books anonymously. He had confessed to some
of his friends that he was the author of some of these books. Only Scheff-
ner knew all of them. There were suspicions, of course. Hamann at times
came close in his guesses, and so did others. Scheffner often had to lie, and
he felt compromised. Some of Hippel's books were very successful through¬
out Germany. He would have been famous, had he acknowledged his au¬
thorship, but he never did. One of the reasons for this was probably his
worry that his career as a high government official would have been com¬
promised, had the king and his ministers in Berlin known that he was
plagued by "demon poesy" and did not spend his entire energy serving
the government.^6
Hippel was not able to dispose of the "chaos of papers" that made up
his literary estate. There were hundreds of pages with notes, observations,
and quotations, compromising bits of information and unflattering
character sketches of his friends.^7 His friends were upset. They felt that
his papers raised questions about Hippel's character. He left the sum of
140,000 Thalers, a large amount at the time. How could this be explained,
if not by avarice?^8 His secretive nature and his literary exploitation of their
friendship was too much for almost all of them.
If this was not enough, he was revealed to have been a great hedonist
(Wohllüstling), who had engaged in all kinds of sexual escapades. One of
his habits had been, for instance, to have his servants flagellate his body