Cupid has always been jealous of the cook. On Thérèse'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. Thérèse 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. In the year 1810 his opera "Sylvana" had been sung, as I have said, with Caroline Brandt in the title rôle. When, in 1813, he was given the direction of the opera at Prague, though he fell into the clutches of the Brunetti, he had unconsciously prepared himself a better, cleaner experience by engaging for the very first member of his new company this same Caroline Brandt, who happened to write him that she happened to be "at liberty," as they say. Like Carl himself, she had known stage-life from childhood, being the daughter of a tenor, and appearing on the stage at the age of eight. She is described as "small and plump in figure, with beautiful, expressive gray eyes and fair wavy hair, and a peculiar liveliness in her movements." She was a woman of large and tender heart, electrified with a temper incisive and immediate. She was an actress of genuine skill, "her sense of grace and beauty in all things infallible." She did not appear at the theatre in Prague until the first day of January, 1814. She bore a curious resemblance to Thérèse Brunetti in a fresher edition, and was not long in giving that lady a sense of uneasiness. The oysters, as we have seen, had given the Brunetti the _coup de disgrâce_.