Madame de stael biography of abraham

1August Wilhelm Schlegel and Caroline were formally divorced in the summer of Herder, before he died in , had had to give his approval as superintendent-general of the Lutheran church and the ducal consistory in Saxe‑Weimar, and Goethe used his good offices with Voigt the minister to see the matter to its conclusion. In their petition to the duke, the divorcing couple cited as grounds ‘diverging aims in life, forced on the undersigned [him] by the pursuit of his literary avocation and [her] by the state of her health, [that] make it impossible for them to live in one and the same place’. If there was more to it than that, and the duke would have been in the know, nobody let on. From now on, Caroline and Schlegel used the formal ‘Sie’ in their letters, but the tone remained friendly. She was now free to marry Schelling, who in joined the great exodus from Jena, that saw him, Paulus, both Hufelands and others move to universities elsewhere.

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