“Even in his account-book, now so often neglected, are to be found the lamentations of his despairing heart over her unworthiness; and again, but a few hours later, expressions of delight that she had smiled on him.  There is something terrible in the bitter slavery to which his better nature was condemned by this wild passion.  One day he writes:  ’A fearful scene....  The sweetest dream of my life is over.  Confidence is lost for ever.  The chain is broken,’ On the next:  ’A painful explanation.  I shed the first tears my grief has wrung from me....  This reconciliation has cleared the thunder from the air.  Both of us felt better,’ And then again:  ’My dream is over!  I shall never know the happiness of being loved.  I must for ever be alone! ...  She can sit near me, hours long, and never say one word; and when some other man is mentioned, burst out in ecstasy.  I will do all I can to please her; but I must withdraw within myself, bury all my bitter feelings in my own heart, and work—­work—­work!’” It was in the fall of 1813—­prosit omen!—­that Von Weber met the Brunetti.  In the next year he was still clinging to her whom the biographer calls “the rotten plant,” and wrote in a note-book:  “I found Calina with Therese, and I could scarcely conceal the fearful rage that burned in me.”  Or an elegy like this:  “No joy without her, and yet with her only sorrow.”

Cupid has always been jealous of the cook.  On Therese’s birthday, Carl presented her with a double gift, first a gold watch with a cluster of trinkets, each of them a symbol of love; with this cluster of trinkets, something very rare and costly in Prague—­oysters.  Therese glanced—­merely glanced—­at the jewelry; she fairly gobbled the oysters.  Carl’s love had survived his jealousy of Calina, but he could not endure a rivalry with mollusks.  As his son explains:  “On a sudden the scales fell from his eyes.”  Ought he not rather have said, the shells?

Lacking even this ogress for an idol, poor Carl was lonely indeed.  Even music turned unresponsive, and success was only ashes on his tongue.  Then faith gave him, unsought, ability to revenge himself on the Brunetti.  She had despised him as a mere genius toddling after the frou-frou of her skirts, but she began to prize him when she saw him casting interested looks in another direction.  Now it was her turn to writhe with jealousy, and to writhe in vain.  Her storms and tirades had more effect upon him than his pleas had had upon her.  But whereas she had formerly been insouciante and amused at his pain, her pain hurt him to distraction, broke down his health, and drove him to ask for a leave of absence, that he might recover his strength.  When he went away, he carried with him in his heart a new regret, sweetened, or perhaps embittered, by a tinge of new hope.  But he could not know that he had reached the end of the worthless pages of his life, and that the new leaf was to be inscribed with a story of happiness, which was by no means untroubled, but yet was constructive happiness, worth-while happiness.