IN SWITZERLAND 35
his knees. He declined most social invitations because he was too
poor and too busy to reciprocate, and he became something of an
ascetic, purely for economic reasons. According to one of his
friends, he lived so frugally that he went about without socks,
gloves, and underwear, stopped buying sugar, soap, and wine, and
lived on the simplest fare and much black coffee. Intermittently,
he received small contributions from Paris. On one such occasion,
he used seventy-five francs, which had been sent him to spend for
clothes, for the journal he was publishing at the time. In the eve
nings, when he frequented the taverns, he often was asked to ad
dress the assembled workers, though there were also those who
shunned him as a false prophet. He found relaxation in the Ger
man singing societies, for, though he knew little about music, he
loved singing.
Weitling considered himself the confrere and the equal of many
refugees in Switzerland who had enjoyed far greater educational
opportunities, and he continued to correspond regularly with the
leadership in Paris.^9 He had complete faith in his mission as he
tramped from one group to another to spread the new gospel of
salvation for the workers. In Zurich he was part of a group which
assembled in the rear of Konrad Wuhrmann's tailor shop. The
young Keller attended a number of their discussions and later
rescued Wuhrmann from oblivion by making him the Master
Hediger, one of the "seven upright," in Keller's Fähnlein der
sieben Aufrechten. Wuhrmann's cupboard was stocked with files
of the Schweizerischer Republikaner and Karl von Rotteck's
Weltgeschichte. It was rifled by the police in 1843.^10 Weitling
also attended the Zurich singing society known as the Hoffnung
and often read aloud to its members from Heinrich Zschokke's
Stunden der Andacht and other literary works.
For days at a time, however, the tailor dropped his needle to
work feverishly with the pen. A Viennese spy reported that he
(^9) E. Schmidt-Weissenfels, Zwölf Schneider: Historische Bilder der bemerkens¬
werthesten Zunftgenossen (Stuttgart, 1878), 73-86.
(^10) Jakob Baechtel, Gottfried Kellers Leben (Berlin, 1895), I, 202-203, 208,