But from the height of glory to which he was now borne, as the living voice of the nation, he was dragged back to the depths by the little hand and the little finger-nails of Caroline, who could be jealous enough to suspect that not all the adoration Von Weber was receiving from the women of Berlin was pure and impersonal patriotism.

Von Weber had from the first insisted that no marriage of theirs could have hope of success, unless she left the stage.  This sacrifice of herself and her career and her large following among the public was a deal to ask, and a deal to grant.  Her combined reluctance to sacrifice her all, and her jealous fears that he would not find her all in all, at last led her to write him that they would better give up their dream, and break their troth.

In his first bitterness at this inopportune humiliation, coming like a drop of vinegar in the honey of royal favour, he wrote furiously to Gansbacher, “I see now that her views of high art are not above the usual pitiful standard—­namely, that art is but a means of procuring soup, meat, and shirts.”  To another friend, Lichtenstein, he wrote more solemnly: 

“All my fondest hopes are vanishing day by day.  I live like a drunken man who dances on a thin coating of ice, and spite of his better reason would persuade himself that he is on solid ground.  I love with all my heart and soul; and if there be no truth in her affection, the last chord of my whole life has been struck.  I shall still live on,—­marry perhaps some day,—­who knows?  But love and trust again, never more.”

In September he returned to Prague with an anxious heart, and took up in person a new battle for Caroline’s hand.  They were agreed upon the subject of affection, but wrangled upon the clauses in the treaty of marriage.  While this debate was waging, Weber took care of her money and her mother’s.  A benefit being given her, he announced that he himself would sell the tickets at the box-office, and he spent a whole day bartering his quick wit and his social influence, for increased prices.  Such public devotion brought scandal buzzing about the ears of the two.  But still Caroline would not give up her career, nor Weber his opinion of stage marriages.

Even his patriotic songs, “The Lyre and the Sword,” were a cause of disagreement, for Caroline, like so many women, deified Napoleon, and her lover’s lyric assaults upon him were so much sacrilege; while to him her adoration of that personified prairie-fire, who had devastated the Fatherland, was treason.  The Brunetti, being well out of the running, Caroline found new cause of jealousy in the newly engaged actress, Christine Bohler.  Indeed, Carl and Caroline did little but fight and make up for months, until even Caroline was convinced that one of the two must leave Prague, at least for a period of probation.  It was Carl who left, and in a condition of almost complete spiritual collapse.

How little music has to do with one’s state of mind, may be seen from the fact that in his weak and complaining despair, he composed one of his sturdiest works, “Kampf und Sieg.”  He settled in Munich, and continued to correspond with Caroline, writing her the most minute descriptions of his life and his lodgings, and begging her to write him with equal fulness.  His loneliness, however, at length told upon his spirits, and gradually stifled his creativeness.