Having solicited all his patrons and friends in turn to procure him an appointment with as little work and as much remuneration as possible, he finally obtained an easy and profitable post in Berlin, through the influence of a minister who was deeply interested in both religion and freemasonry. He gave himself up for a time to all the amusements and dissipations of the capital; but, after the defeat of the Prussians by Napoleon, he threw up his appointment and began to lead a wandering life. He was alone and free, for all his marriages had been childless, and he had inherited a fortune at his mother's death. He travelled through Germany and Austria, that "blessed land," as he calls it, made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël, and visited her at Coppet. In Weimar he succeeded in obtaining a pension from the Prince-Primate (Fürst-Primas) Dalberg. Professor Passow, who made his acquaintance in Weimar, wrote to Voss: "I dislike Werner exceedingly, for the reason that I have never seen him twice the same. This is the consequence of his insufferable anxiety to please every one. It depends entirely upon his company whether he is the low libertine or the pious devotee of the most modern, most spiritual type." A clergyman named Christian Mayr obtained great influence over him. Mayr was a fanatic and an eccentric. In order to realise one of the visions in the Book of Revelations and to attain heavenly wisdom, he swallowed the greater part of a Bible, and was dangerously ill in consequence; he shot with a pistol at any member of his congregation who fell asleep when he was preaching; and he believed that he could, during the celebration of the sacrament, produce real flesh and blood. This man was desirous that Werner should join a great secret society, the "Kreuzesbrüder im Orient." At first Werner was very enthusiastic in the matter, then he began to entertain doubts, and these doubts partly led to his conversion to Catholicism. In November 1809, after paying a visit at Coppet, he went to Rome, where he spent several years. His conversion took place in 1810. During his years of wandering he had led the maddest of lives, dividing each day between low debauchery and religious excitement, between gross sensual indulgence and solemn intercourse with the Deity. The fragments of his diary, published in two small volumes by Schütz, betray a coarse immorality, an obscenity of thought, and a shamelessness of expression, which are rendered only the more repulsive by the outbursts of miserable remorse and self-accusation which interrupt the detailed descriptions of erotic experiences.