In 1796, at the suggestion of the gifted, emancipated and ill-starred Charlotte von Kalb, Jean Paul visited Weimar, already a Mecca of literary pilgrimage and the centre of neo-classicism.  There, those who, like Herder, were jealous of Goethe, and those who, like Frau von Stein, were estranged from him, received the new light with enthusiasm—­others with some reserve.  Goethe and Schiller, who were seeking to blend the classical with the German spirit, demurred to the vagaries of Jean Paul’s unquestioned genius.  His own account of his visit to “the rock-bound Schiller” and to Goethe’s “palatial hall” are precious commonplaces of the histories of literature.  There were sides of Goethe’s universal genius to which Richter felt akin, but he was quite ready to listen to Herder’s warning against his townsman’s “unrouged” infidelity, which had become socially more objectionable since Goethe’s union with Christiane Vulpius, and Jean Paul presently returned to Hof, carrying with him the heart of Charlotte von Kalb, an unprized and somewhat embarrassing possession.  He wished no heroine; for he was no hero, as he remarked dryly, somewhat later, when Charlotte had become the first of many “beautiful souls” in confusion of spirit about their heart’s desire.

In 1797 the death of Jean Paul’s mother dissolved home bonds and he soon left Hof forever, though still for a time maintaining diligent correspondence with the “erotic academy” as well as with new and more aristocratic “daughters of the Storm and Stress.”  The writings of this period are unimportant, some of them unworthy.  Jean Paul was for a time in Leipzig and in Dresden.  In October, 1798, he was again in Weimar, which, in the sunshine of Herder’s praise, seemed at first his “Canaan,” though he soon felt himself out of tune with Duchess Amalia’s literary court.  To this time belongs a curious Conjectural Biography, a pretty idyl of an ideal courtship and marriage as his fancy now painted it for himself.  Presently he was moved to essay the realization of this ideal and was for a time betrothed to Karoline von Feuchtersleben, her aristocratic connections being partially reconciled to the mesalliance by Richter’s appointment as Legationsrat.  He begins already to look forward, a little ruefully, to the time when his heart shall be “an extinct marriage-crater,” and after a visit to Berlin, where he basked in the smiles of Queen Luise, he was again betrothed, this time to the less intellectually gifted, but as devoted and better dowered Karoline Mayer, whom he married in 1801.  He was then in his thirty-eighth year.

Richter’s marriage is cardinal in his career.  Some imaginative work he was still to do, but the dominant interests were hereafter to be in education and in political action.  In his own picturesque language, hitherto his quest had been for the golden fleece of womanhood, hereafter it was to be for a crusade of men.  The change had been already foreshadowed in 1799 by his stirring paper On Charlotte Corday (published in 1801).