This batman was a cut above the ordinary: he filled two books with explanations of the principles and practical applications of arithmetic and kept notebooks in both German and French in which he recorded his journeys and copied out pages of poetry and prose, both pious and profane. It was in his master’s house in Basel that he met Ursula Oertlin (1726–73), a peasant’s daughter from the Wiese valley in the Black Forest in the margravate of Baden who was a maid in the same household. They were married in 1759 in a village in Baden. The ceremony could not be held in Basel, where mixed marriages were not allowed (he was of the Reformed Church, she a Lutheran). Their son was to be convinced, perhaps by the particular example provided by his parents as much as by the climate of enlightened thought in the eighteenth century, that love, common sense and humanity could and should transcend the barriers between different religions. The newly-weds lived in the tiny town of Hausen in the Black Forest that winter, where he worked as a weaver, and both returned to service with the Iselin family in Basel the next summer. (Hebel was later to write of men from small communities who could not support themselves all the year round from their craft or trade.) Johann Peter, born on 10 May 1760, was their first child. A year later his sister, Susanne, was born, but in the same year, 1761, she and their father died, victims of an epidemic in Basel. The widowed mother continued to live part of the year in Hausen, part in Basel, so the young Hebel received his earliest education in the country and in town and got to know the lives of peasants and burghers and the minds of rich and poor. He was thirteen years old and had begun to attend the grammar school in the town of Lörrach in the Black Forest when he learnt that his mother had fallen ill in Basel and had died on the road between there and Hausen. The vanity of earthly things, of which his pious mother must often have spoken, was an early and unforgettable part of his experience.

Ursula Hebel had wished for her son to enter the Lutheran Church. His teachers had reason to hope that he would be worthy of such a career, for he was a very promising pupil. With that future in mind, and with the help of money from the Iselin family and the proceeds of the sale of his mother’s house in Hausen, the orphan was sent to the most prestigious school in Baden. Sporting his first pair of shoes he travelled for four days from the Wiese valley to the ‘Gymnasium illustre’ in the state capital Karlsruhe, and there over the next four years he maintained his early academic promise. In 1778 he went to study theology at university in Erlangen. By 1780 he had qualified for the ministry, but he was not offered a parish. It appears that he had somehow disappointed the teachers and clergymen who had high hopes of him. It can only be surmised that he had not been too assiduous in his theological studies and that his examination results were not outstanding. In Erlangen he could not afford orgies even if he had desired such indulgence, yet the signs are that he led a relaxed student’s life. He had joined a duelling club, kept a dog as his constant companion, and was seldom seen without his pipe. His later writings suggest that he distinguished between religious faith and doctrinal pedantry, practical and theoretical Christianity. Neither that attitude nor the fact that he was never a killjoy and was always to appreciate convivial evenings at a hostelry need, however, have debarred him from a country living. But unknown to him in 1780 his dreams of a parish in the Black Forest were never to be realized.

The next ten years of his life were spent in relative poverty. He was a tutor to a rural vicar’s children, then a teacher at a school in Lörrach, with its 1,700 inhabitants the largest town in the Wiese valley. Those years were in retrospect to appear the happiest of his life. He was in the countryside he loved best, read a great deal, and had the opportunity to explore the Black Forest and to travel into Switzerland and Alsace. His treatment of carefree wanderers in his later writings indicates that he cherished the chance to roam the countryside and be free of responsibilities. In Lörrach he found three lifelong friends in a fellow teacher, a young clergyman, and the teacher’s sister-in-law. His relationship with her, Gustave Fecht, was a close one, but for long he was too poor to marry, and afterwards, for reasons which his biographers have failed to unearth, he never proposed to her. During this time in Lörrach he expressed the liberalness of his faith by indulging with a select group of friends in a fantastic semi–jocular cult of Proteus whom they revered as the spirit of the perpetual mutability of the world.