“Marriages were concluded for a term only: in the case of persons of standing for =five= years; among the lower classes for a shorter term. It was =very rare=, however, only in cases in which the marriage was manifestly unhappy, for a separation to take place when the term expired. If there were healthy living children such a separation hardly ever occurred--most of these temporary marriages were, in fact, extremely happy, and the same is true of Jewish marriages, in which divorce is easily effected by a very simple ceremonial, closely resembling that of the Japanese.”[193] In view of the remarkable coincidence between the proposal in Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” and the Japanese custom, we are probably justified in assuming that Goethe was acquainted with the latter. “Lucinde” gave expression to the feelings and moods of the time in respect of love and marriage on behalf of a circle far wider than that of the romanticists. At no time were the ideals of free love so deeply felt, so enthusiastically presented, as then; above all, by the beautiful Karoline, who, after long “marriage wanderings,” especially with A. W. Schegel, finally found the happiness of her life in a free marriage with Schelling, which subsequently became a legally recognized union. “In her letters,” says Kuno Fischer, “she praises again and again the man of her choice and of her heart, in whose love she had really attained the goal which she had longed and sought in labyrinthine wanderings.... And that Schelling was the man who was able completely to master the heart of this woman and to make her his own, gives to his features also an expression which beautifies them.”[194] Rahel, Dorothea Schlegel, and Henriette Herz, extolled, under the influence of “Lucinde,” the happiness of free love. For this period of genius in Jena and Berlin, as Rudolph von Gottschall calls it, the free-love relationship of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia and Frau Pauline Wiesel was typical. This relationship is more intimately known to us from the letters exchanged between the two, published by Alexander Büchner in 1865. In these letters, to quote a saying of Ludmilla Assing, we find “the most passionate expression of all that it is possible to express in writing.” In France the discussion of the question of free love was to an important extent associated with the communistic-socialistic ideas of Saint Simon, Enfantin, and Fourier. Before this, Rétif de la Bretonne, in his “Découverte Australe” (a work which exercised a great influence upon Charles Fourier),[195] demanded that the duration of marriage should be in the first instance two years, with which period the contract should spontaneously terminate. Saint Simon and Barrault proclaimed the “free wife,” Père Enfantin proclaimed the “free union,” and Fourier proclaimed “free love” in the phalanstery.