n far-away seas.

He was now alone.[34] There were no more friendly voices; all that he
heard was a hideous duet between loneliness and weariness, sung in his
ear during the bustle of the day and in the silence of the night.[35] He
was wasted with disease. In 1856, at Weimar, following great fatigue, he
was seized with an internal malady. It began with great mental distress;
he used to sleep in the streets. He suffered constantly; he was like "a
tree without leaves, streaming with rain." At the end of 1861, the
disease was in an acute stage. He had attacks of pain sometimes lasting
thirty hours, during which he would writhe in agony in his bed. "I live
in the midst of my physical pain, overwhelmed with weariness. Death is
very slow."[36]

[Footnote 33: _Memoires_, II, 420.]

[Footnote 34: "I do not know how Berlioz has managed to be cut off like
this. He has neither friends nor followers; neither the warm sun of
popularity nor the pleasant shade of friendship" (Liszt to the Princess
of Wittgenstein, 16 May, 1861).]

[Footnote 35: In a letter to Bennet he says, "I am weary, I am
weary...." How often does this piteous cry sound in his letters towards
the end of his life. "I feel I am going to die.... I am weary unto
death" (21 August, 1868--six months before his death).]

[Footnote 36: Letter to Asger Hammerick, 1865.]

Worst of all, in the heart of his misery, there was nothing that
comforted him. He believed in nothing--neither in God nor immortality.

"I have no faith.... I hate all philosophy and everything that
resembles it, whether religious or otherwise.... I am as incapable
of making a medicine of faith as of having faith in medicine."[37]

"God is stupid and cruel in his complete indifference."[38]

He did not believe in beauty or honour, in mankind or himself.

"Everything passes. Space and time consume beauty, youth, love,
glory, genius. Human life is nothing; death is no better. Worlds
are born and die like ourselves. All is nothing. Yes, yes, yes! All
is nothing.... To love or hate, enjoy or suffer, admire or sneer,
live or die--what does it matter? There is nothing in greatness or
littleness, beauty or ugliness. Eternity is indifferent;
indifference is eternal."[39]

"I am weary of life; and I am forced to see that belief in
absurdities is necessary to human minds, and that it is born in
them as insects are born in swamps."[40]