Later, in 1872, she became a sworn translator and interpreter in the field of peninsular, civil, criminal and political affairs for the Municipality of Berlin and the Prussian Foreign Ministry, a move she made under the influence of her father, who was the Parliament’s Director of Tachygraphic Services at the time. She was also around seventeen when she began publishing in specialist Romance journals.

It was as part of her usual practice of swapping critiques that in 1872 she found herself involved for the first time – albeit as a spectator – in a literary controversy. This was the romantic episode that led to her acquisition of Portuguese nationality as a result of her involvement with the art historian Joaquim de Vasconcelos, so the story deserves a short summary at this point.

Karoline used to read and contribute to Bibliografia Crítica de História e Literatura, a Porto journal published by the Germanophile Adolfo Coelho, and from Berlin she followed the controversy that arose around Fausto – a version of Goethe’s work that António Feliciano de Castilho “transferred” into Portuguese, despite the fact that he himself admitted he was not familiar with the original. Teófilo Braga, Joaquim de Vasconcelos and other literati launched a fierce attack on Castilho, but above all on those who defended him, a primary example being the work’s learned publisher, José Gomes Monteiro, who also wrote Os críticos do Fausto do Sr. Visconde de Castilho (The critics of Fausto by Viscount Castilho, 1873). Vasconcelos spent part of his life in Germany, and as such proved to be not only the most intrepid but also the best informed of the combatants, even investing in the translation of a number of passages from the book. Our attentive philologist included this affair among the news items she was publishing at the time under the title ‘Neues aus Spanien und Portugal’ (News of Spain and Portugal), in the Berlin weekly Magazin für die Literatur Auslande (1873), while simultaneously keeping up a correspondence – especially heated in the case of Vasconcelos – with the Portuguese. Today, although the documents themselves have disappeared, this lively exchange of letters between the young Portuguese Germanophile and the German Romanist is talked about with airs of a romantic novel. The story of their marriage in Berlin, in 1876, increased this aura still further. The groom is said to have been forced to leave his train, which was held up by the civil war in Spain, and cross the Pyrenees on horseback. After the wedding, a long journey through Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, France and Spain only ended when the couple took root in the city of Porto. They probably also made other trips, albeit we do not have details of them.

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