Book One: Mariane

The play went on a long time. Old Barbara went to the window several times and listened for the rattle of carriages. She was waiting for Mariane, her pretty mistress, who that evening, in the afterpiece, dressed as a young officer, had delighted the public. On the table Barbara had laid out the presents that had come from Norberg, a rich young merchant who was away and wanted Mariane for himself: a piece of fine muslin, ribbons, a purse.

Mariane came in, still in her officer's coat, and threw herself into the old woman's arms; but when Barbara showed her the presents and spoke of Norberg, she pushed them away. In fourteen days Norberg would be back; until then she meant to belong wholly to the one she loved. Barbara scolded: Wilhelm was a merchant's son, young and in love and with nothing of his own; Norberg was rich, and would keep them both. "I love him!" cried Mariane. Then there was a step on the stairs, and Wilhelm came in, and she flew to meet him.

Wilhelm Meister was the son of a well-to-do merchant, and was to follow his father into the business. But since his childhood he had loved the theatre more than anything; and now he loved Mariane, and the theatre in her.

At home his mother told him that his father disliked his going to the playhouse every evening. "And whose fault is it?" said Wilhelm. "Who gave us the puppet show, that Christmas Eve?" His mother remembered it too: how on Christmas Eve a curtain had gone up in the doorway of the second room, and there was a little stage, with David and Goliath, Saul and Samuel and Jonathan, little figures that moved and spoke, and how the children had stared. Wilhelm asked where the puppets were now, and carried them off to his room.

That night he took them to Mariane, and they played with them, and Mariane liked Jonathan best; Barbara sent out for oysters and champagne; and Wilhelm began to tell his story. How after that Christmas he had lain awake longing for the stage, which had vanished in the morning; how the lieutenant of artillery who had made the puppets persuaded his father to allow a second performance, and he had crept behind the stage and seen the wires and the strings, and felt that he knew nothing until he understood the whole. How he had found the key to the pantry, where children's stolen pleasures are kept, and stolen dried fruit, and found the little playbook of David and Goliath, and learned it by heart, and played it himself to his family, doing all the voices — and dropped Jonathan, in his excitement, in the middle of the performance. How he had gone on to operas, with storms and thunder, and collected costumes until the wardrobe was larger than the plays.

He told how he and his friends had played at knights, in paper armour, and tried to stage the story of Tancred and Clorinda from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered; but the boys did not know their lines, and in the end they played David and Goliath again, with a clown thrown in. How he had written plays, always beginning with the last act; how his father had put him in the counting house; and how he had once written a poem in which the Muse of Tragedy and a careful housewife, who stood for Trade, quarrelled over a young man, and the young man chose the Muse. Mariane, tired, fell asleep in his arms while he talked; and Barbara poured out the wine.

Wilhelm was happy. He believed his love was making him a new man; he saw himself as the future founder of a German national theatre. Mariane, meanwhile, felt the weight of her poverty and her dependence, and was ashamed.

At home Werner, his friend, the son of his father's partner, came to see him: a sensible, busy young man who loved order and profit. He praised trade, double-entry bookkeeping, the noble art of the merchant; Wilhelm answered that he wanted to improve men, not profit from their follies. The two fathers decided that Wilhelm should go on a journey to collect debts from the firm's customers, and buy a horse; and Wilhelm saw the hand of providence in it. He would go, and not come back. He would take Mariane, and join a company of players, and become what he was meant to be. That night he told Mariane his plan. She said nothing; she only sighed, and kissed him. When he had gone, she lay weeping in her bed, and Barbara told her she must simply keep both her lovers, and hide it from the manager; and Mariane, worn out, said she would do as Barbara said.

On his journey, at the house of one of the firm's customers, Wilhelm heard that the daughter of the house had run off with an actor named Melina; and the next day he saw the couple brought back on a cart, Melina in chains. At the magistrate's office the young woman defended herself with spirit, and appealed to a higher justice. Wilhelm took pity on them, spoke for them, and persuaded her family to let them marry. Melina asked him to find him a place with some theatre; Wilhelm tried, and could find nothing; and the Melinas went away.

He came home, and wrote Mariane a long letter: they would go away together, and marry, and begin a new life in the theatre. He took it to her one evening; but she was strange and absent, and begged him to leave her alone that night. He went, unhappy, and walked the streets; and towards midnight he came back to her house and stood in the shadow below her window, full of love, and kissed the threshold. Then the door opened, and a man in a cloak came out and slipped away.

He would not believe it. He went home; and as he took up the scarf of Mariane's that he had carried away with him, a little note fell out of it: "How I love you, little fool! Tonight I shall be with you again. Norberg."