“Many a female heart, no doubt, both within the theatre and without its walls, was allured by the sweet smile and seductive manners of the pale, slender, languishing, but passionately ardent young conductor; whilst his own heart seems to have been more seriously involved in an unfortunate and misplaced attachment for a singer in the theatre.  This woman was married to a rough drunkard who mishandled her.  The couple were daily falling more and more into an abject state of poverty.  Young Carl Maria pitied the woman; and pity was soon transformed in the feeling next akin.”

“That she was an unworthy object of either pity or affection is very clear:  she misused his goodness of heart, gnawed incessantly at his slender purse, and quickly plunged him into a slough of difficulties nigh equal to her own.”

Various misfortunes and indiscretions brought Von Weber to the loss of his post.  But a woman intervened to save him from disaster.  This was a Fraeulein von Belonda, maid of honour to the Duchess of Wuertemberg, who took a deep interest in Carl, and persuaded the duke to make him musical director.  The continual successes of the French armies overrunning Europe forbade the duke to keep up his retinue of artists.  But he secured Weber a post at Stuttgart as private secretary to his brother, Ludwig, another younger brother of the King of Wuertemberg, a monster of corpulence, who had to have his dining-table made crescent-wise that he might get near enough to eat.  Into the circle of these two unlovable figures and their ugly court Weber was thrust.

“Thus then the fiery young artist, his wild oats not yet fully sown, plunged into a new world, where no true sense of right or wrong was known; where virtue and morality were laughed to scorn; where, in the chaotic whirlpool of a reckless court, money and influence at any price were the sole ends and aims of life; where, in the confusion of the times, the insecurity of conditions, and the ruthless despotism of the government, the sole watchword of existence, from high to low, was ‘Apres moi, le deluge!’” The Prince Ludwig was a great spendthrift, and was continually appealing to his brother for funds.  It was poor Weber’s pleasant task to be the go-between, and to receive on his head the rage of Behemoth.  Again to quote the vivid language of the Baron Max: 

“The stammering, stuttering, shrieking rage of the hideously corpulent king, who, on account of his unwieldy obesity, was unable to let his arms hang by his side, and who thus gesticulated wildly, and perspired incessantly, and had the habit, moreover, of continually addressing his favourite, generally present on these occasions, with the appeal, ’Pas vrai, Dillen?’ after each broken sentence,—­would have been inexpressibly droll, had not the low-comedy actor of the scene been an autocrat who might, at a wink, have transformed laughter into tears.  But there was a demoniacal comicality about the performance, which, if it did not convulse the spectator, made him shudder to his heart’s core.