Schumann's letters and diaries give evidence that he was concerned with Jean Paul (1763–1825) throughout his life, but his original encounters with Jean Paul's works took place in the mid- to late 1820s, and his personal writings from this period reflect the wallop he felt from his collision with the five great novels, in particular. He had certainly read all of them by 1828, the year he made a pilgrimage to the Franconian towns of Hof and Bayreuth, southwest of his hometown, Zwickau. In Bayreuth, Schumann visited Jean Paul's last home and gravesite, and noted in his diary: “Jean Paul's grave … deep pain … Jean P.'s sitting-room and chair … — Eremitage [a grand house in Bayreuth] … friendly memories of Jean Paul— … a promenade by the Fantaisie [a palace in the Bayreuth area]—monuments —Polymeter [a form of free verse ‘invented’ by the character Walt in the novel Flegeljahre; Schumann wrote a few of these himself].” The “Fantaisie” is a palace outside of Bayreuth which served as backdrop for several crucial scenes in Jean Paul's novel Siebenkäs (1796/7), while a Polymeter is an unrhymed prose poem contained within a short paragraph, a form “invented” by Walt, the hero of the novel Flegeljahre (1804/5) (later to be better known as Schumann's Eusebius character). Probably what Schumann was indicating here was that he himself had written a Polymeter inspired by his Bayreuth visit—not an unlikely prospect, since several Polymeter poems by Schumann survive elsewhere.