fresco of psychopathic experience remains the first great and influential specimen of program music created in France; and it is no less amazing to reflect that the epochal score came into being when its composer was but 27 and only at the time he was adjudged worthy of the Prix de Rome.

Berlioz subsequently sent tickets for a performance of the symphony to Henrietta Smithson. She appears to have been about the only person in the hall unaware at that time that she was the heroine of the piece. More or less vaguely she had been hearing of the infatuation of her harassed admirer. Her reaction, lightly expressed, had been “There could be nothing more impossible!” It was not in Hector’s nature to accept such a rejection as final. Still, she had unwittingly wounded him! For a while he decided that, with all her beauty and her gifts, she was no different from the average run of females. If she could think of repudiating his love the “Fantastique” was his derisive answer! This musical caricature of the actress, he intended as a gesture of vengeance.

The new symphony, however, helped gain him a friend and defender, who was to remain one of his most valiant supporters for life—Franz Liszt. Liszt had met Hector shortly before and, transported by the symphony, he made a piano arrangement of it, which propagandized the work as, at the time, nothing else could have done.

* * *

Scarcely liberated (as he thought) from Henrietta, Berlioz succumbed to another woman. This young person, decidedly no better than she should have been, was a friend of Ferdinand Hiller and a piano pupil of Kalkbrenner and Herz. Camille Moke set her nets for Hector and captured him without the slightest trouble. She came into his life at the worst possible moment! With the consent of her mother, briefly blinded by the young man’s success in winning the Roman Prize, Camille became engaged to her admirer, who was just about to set out for that sojourn in Rome which was the chief reward of a lucky contestant. He seems not to have foreseen trouble, though his sister, Nanci, was beset by premonitions; and Ferdinand Hiller sent to Berlioz, in Rome, the ironic message that his betrothed “was bearing the separation with fortitude”. Shocked but still only half convinced, Hector took to bed and waited vainly for Camille’s expected letters to Italy. Time passed and nothing came. Whatever interest he might have found in the Eternal City, where he had been warmly received by his fellow students at the Villa Medici and by its director, Horace Vernet, he was unable to pay any attention to his work or his agreeable surroundings. Little really mattered—neither the monuments of Rome, the French Academy, his meeting with the well-graced youth, Felix Mendelssohn, his future prospects. Vernet, noticing Hector’s worry, began to entertain serious misgivings. Summoning the newcomer he warned him against any rash step. Finally, on Good Friday the tormented lover impulsively left Rome, resolved to return to Paris and find out for himself what lay behind Camille’s silence. In roundabout ways he got as far as Nice. On the journey he bought a pistol and some poison determined to learn the truth and if worst came to worst to shoot Camille and then make an end of himself. He was not obliged to go to these spectacular extremes. For at long last he received a letter—not, indeed, from his presumable fiancée, but from her mother. That lady informed Hector that her daughter was on the point of marrying Mr. Pleyel, the famous piano manufacturer; and she requested her “son-in-law” not to kill himself!

Of course he would kill himself—and the Mokes as well! But as he looked at the lovely Côte d’Azur landscape unrolled before him from the heights of the Grande Corniche he suddenly experienced a revulsion of feeling. For the time being he would go on living! He dispatched a letter to Horace Vernet saying he was returning to Rome and pledging his honor to remain in Italy. Then he settled down for three weeks in Nice and wrote his “King Lear” Overture.

* * *

Hector became more or less resigned to Rome, now that the Moke affair was definitely at an end; but was never completely at home there. He enjoyed the company of Mendelssohn, for the two were well matched, intellectually, if not well balanced by temperament. However, Felix adored Gluck as much as Hector and the two youths delighted in singing and playing “Armide” together. They agreed whole-heartedly in their worship of Mozart, Beethoven and Weber but disagreed on Bach, whom the German idolized but to whom Berlioz remained cold. When the pair went over Hector’s prize-crowned “Sardanapale” and the Frenchman frankly expressed his dislike for a certain number in it, Mendelssohn told his friend he was happy to see that he really displayed such good taste! Hector made the usual excursions, saw the regulation sights, visited the mountains of the Abruzzi, wandered about the Campagna, renewed his Virgilian recollections, sang, strummed his guitar, heard the operas and the generally trivial and ill performed church music and mingled with the painters at the Café Greco. In short, he went more or less through the customary tourist routine.

Also, he composed. He made changes in the score of the “Fantastique” adding, for one thing, a coda to the Ball Scene; he wrote overtures to “The Corsair”, based on Byron, and “Rob Roy” based on Scott, not to mention an ambitious pendant to the “Fantastique”, “Le Retour à la Vie”, to which he subsequently gave the alternative title of “Lélio”. But by 1832 he decided he had endured as much of Rome as he could stomach. After a compromise with Horace Vernet he cut short his stay at the Villa Medici by six months promising to spend a year in Germany—an ambition he had always cherished.

In November, 1832, Berlioz was back in Paris, and in that very house where Henrietta Smithson had lodged on her first visit. In fact, she had moved out only a day earlier and settled in an apartment on the Rue de Rivoli. Small wonder that Hector discerned the working of destiny once more!

This time Henrietta had come to Paris with her own theatrical company. Incredible as it may seem, she and Hector had not yet actually met. The Irish actress divined his passion fully when, at a performance under the conductor Habeneck (at which not only the “Fantastique” but also the monodrama, “Lélio”, were performed) she heard from the actor who spoke the text the words: “Ah, could I but find this Juliet, this Ophelia, whom my heart is ever seeking.... Could I but sleep my last sad sleep in her beloved arms”! Instead of going to Germany at New Year’s, 1833, Berlioz determined to remain, for the moment, in Paris. His love for Henrietta had been newly awakened; and she was now willing to be formally introduced to him.

“From that day I had not a moment’s rest. Terrible fears were succeeded by delirious hopes. What I went through ... cannot be described. Her mother and sister formally opposed our union. My own parents would not hear of it. Discontent and anger on the part of both families, and all the scenes to which such opposition gives birth in these cases”.

Portents of trouble followed thick and fast. Henrietta Smithson’s theatrical venture failed disastrously. Financially she was utterly ruined, the more so as she had contracted immense debts. Next, she fell and broke her leg. She was bed-ridden and she remained an invalid. Hector organized a benefit concert for her. Among the first to offer their services were Liszt and Chopin. Enough was realized to settle “Harriet’s” most pressing obligations. And then, despite his parents’ objections and the venomous hostility of