Schopenhauer proceeded from Switzerland to Italy, and did not return to Berlin until May 1825.  Caroline Marquet renewed her complaints before the courts, stating that his ill-usage had occasioned a fever through which she had lost the power of one of her arms, that her whole system was entirely shaken, and demanding a monthly allowance as compensation.  She won her case; the defendant had to pay three hundred thalers in costs and contribute sixty thalers a year to her maintenance while she lived.  Schopenhauer on returning to Berlin did what he could to get the judgment reversed, but unsuccessfully.  The woman lived for twenty years; he inscribed on her death certificate, “Obit anus, obit onus"

The idea of marriage seems to have more or less possessed Schopenhauer about this time, but he could not finally determine to take the step.  There is sufficient to show in the following essays in what light he regarded women.  Marriage was a debt, he said, contracted in youth and paid off in old age.  Married people have the whole burden of life to bear, while the unmarried have only half, was a characteristically selfish apothegm.  Had not all the true philosophers been celibates—­Descartes, Leibnitz, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Kant?  The classic writers were of course not to be considered, because with them woman occupied a subordinate position.  Had not all the great poets married, and with disastrous consequences?  Plainly, Schopenhauer was not the person to sacrifice the individual to the will of the species.

In August 1831 he made a fortuitous expedition to Frankfort-on-the-Main—­an expedition partly prompted by the outbreak of cholera at Berlin at the time, and partly by the portent of a dream (he was credulous in such matters) which at the beginning of the year had intimated his death.  Here, however, he practically remained until his death, leading a quiet, mechanically regular life and devoting his thoughts to the development of his philosophic ideas, isolated at first, but as time went on enjoying somewhat greedily the success which had been denied him in his earlier days.  In February 1839 he had a moment of elation when he heard from the Scientific Society of Drontheim that he had won the prize for the best essay on the question, “Whether free will could be proved from the evidence of consciousness,” and that he had been elected a member of the Society; and a corresponding moment of despondency when he was informed by the Royal Danish Academy of the Sciences at Copenhagen, in a similar competition, that his essay on “Whether the source and foundation of ethics was to be sought in an intuitive moral idea, and in the analysis of other derivative moral conceptions, or in some other principle of knowledge,” had failed, partly on the ground of the want of respect which it showed to the opinions of the chief philosophers.  He published these essays in 1841 under the title of “The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics,” and ten years later Parerga und Paralipomena