Here was one manifestation of the law of heredity; contemplation of the other is less agreeable. From Franz Anton von Weber his son inherited an instability of character which for a time threatened to make shipwreck of his divine gifts. The whole of Franz Anton's life was the career of an adventurer. In his youth he was a titled rake in Mannheim. He became a soldier and was slightly wounded fighting against Frederick the Great at Rosbach. The Elector of Cologne, Clément Augustus, gave him an appointment and on the death of his father-in-law advanced him to the posts which the latter had held--Steward and Court Councillor. From these posts he was dismissed with a small pension by Clément Augustus's successor in the Electorate. It is said that his devotion to music was partly the cause of his dismissal. He was fonder of his fiddle than of his duties, and often went walking in the fields, playing on his viol, his eight children trooping behind him as if he were another Pied Piper. He married into a councillorship and fiddled himself out of it. The Prince-Bishop who appointed him was the gay prelate who "danced himself out of this world into another" and who gave employment to Beethoven's grandfather and father in his court band; the Prince-Bishop who dismissed him was the serious-minded and thrifty Maximilian Frederick, who became the master of Beethoven himself. Those who are fond of delving for remote causes may associate the birth of Weber with this action of Beethoven's patron. Franz Anton, having lost his position and squandered his wife's fortune, started out on a dramatic and musical itinerancy. His wife did not survive her humiliation. He wandered through Germany after three years of service as Chapelmaster to the Bishop of Lübeck and Eutin, and in 1784 found his way to Vienna, where he placed two of his sons under the tuition of Haydn, and a year later married the sixteen-year-old Genoveva von Brenner, a daughter in the family that had given a home to his sons. This delicate flower the adventurer of fifty plucked out of its genial surroundings in the Austrian capital and transplanted to Eutin, whither he now returned to accept the post of town musician, another having meanwhile won the once despised but now coveted chapelmastership. Small wonder that when Carl Maria Friedrich Ernest, the first child of this mistaken marriage was born he should have brought with him into the world a frail and puny body afflicted with a disease of the hip which was the cause of the composer's lifelong lameness.