The officials and the upper classes in the town spoke French and were French in their tastes and habits, but the great majority of its citizens clung to their national traditions with the tenacity of the conquered.

It is Goethe's own testimony that his residence in Strassburg precisely at this period of his life was a decisive circumstance for his future development.

At the moment of his arrival, he had not yet completely broken with French models, and he would even appear to have had vague dreams that he would eventually choose the French language as his literary medium.[64] Ever responsive to the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere in which he found himself, however, the intensely German sympathies of his Strassburg circle definitely turned him from a career which would have cut off his genius from its profoundest sources.
[Footnote 64: So we are led to infer from what he says in Part iii., Book ii.

of _Dichtung und Wahrheit_.] His decisive rejection of French for German ideals was the governing fact of his sojourn in Strassburg, but he had other experiences there which show that he was the same variable being of the Leipzig days.
His first letters from his new home would seem to show that he had brought with him something of the pious sentiments he had acquired from his association with Fraeulein von Klettenberg, though his expression of them has a singular savour.

About a fortnight after his arrival in Strassburg he writes as follows to one Limprecht, a theological student whose acquaintance he had made in Leipzig: "I am now again _Studiosus_, and, thank God, have now as much health as I need, and spirits in superabundance.