Caroline won the poor director's gratitude first by being quick to adopt suggestions, and to rescue him from the embarrassments buzzing about the head of an operatic manager. She was glad to undertake tasks, and slow to show professional jealousy. She lived in seclusion with her mother, and received no visits. Even the young noblemen could not woo her at the stage door, though the Brunetti advised her to accept the advances of a certain banker, saying: "He is worth the trouble, for he is rich." Having failed to drag Caroline into her own game, the Brunetti tried to keep Von Weber from breathing the better air of her presence. As we have seen, she drove him almost to distraction, and sent him a wreck to the baths in Friedland. Caroline's mother had permitted Von Weber to pay his court to her, and her father and brother had found his intentions worthy. Caroline had not hesitated to confess that her affection was growing with Carl's. But what she had seen of his life with the Brunetti, and what she must have heard of his magnificent dissipations, gave her pause. Therefore, when Carl went away for his health, he took with him a riddle, and left behind "a sweet, beloved being who might--who may--make me happy." "The absence of three months shall test our love." They wrote each other long and daily letters; his were all of yearning, while hers were mingled with fear, lest he be, as she wrote him, "a sweet poison harmful to the soul." After taking the baths, he went on to Berlin, arriving there August 3d in the very ferment of rapture over the downfall of Napoleon at Prague. He was moved to write a number of patriotic songs from Koerner's "Leier und Schwert." These choruses for men were sung throughout the Fatherland, as they still are sung. 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: