n the cemetery; I found a comfortable
seat on a costly tomb, and I went to sleep.... Paris is to me a
cemetery and her pavements are tomb-stones. Everywhere are memories
of friends or enemies that are dead.... I do nothing but suffer
unceasing pain and unspeakable weariness. I wonder night and day if
I shall die in great pain or with little of it--I am not foolish
enough to hope to die without any pain at all. Why are we not
dead?"[44]

His music is like these mournful words; it is perhaps even more
terrible, more gloomy, for it breathes death.[45] What a contrast: a
soul greedy of life and preyed upon by death. It is this that makes his
life such an awful tragedy. When Wagner met Berlioz he heaved a sigh of
relief--he had at last found a man more unhappy than himself.[46]

[Footnote 44: Letters to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 January, 1859;
30 August, 1864; 13 July, 1866; and to A. Morel, 21 August, 1864.]

[Footnote 45: " ... Qui viderit illas
De lacrymis factas sentiet esse meis,"
wrote Berlioz, as an inscription for his _Tristes_ in 1854.]

[Footnote 46: "One instantly recognises a companion in misfortune; and I
found I was a happier man than Berlioz" (Wagner to Liszt, 5 July,
1855).]

On the threshold of death he turned in despair to the one ray of light
left him--_Stella montis_, the inspiration of his childish love;
Estelle, now old, a grandmother, withered by age and grief. He made a
pilgrimage to Meylan, near Grenoble, to see her. He was then sixty-one
years old and she was nearly seventy. "The past! the past! O Time!
Nevermore! Nevermore!"[47]

Nevertheless, he loved her, and loved her desperately. How pathetic it
is. One has little inclination to smile when one sees the depths of that
desolate heart. Do you think he did not see, as clearly as you or I
would see, the wrinkled old face, the indifference of age, the "_triste
raison_," in her he idealised? Remember, he was the most ironical of
men. But he did not wish to see these things, he wished to cling to a
little love, which would help him to live in the wilderness of life.

"There is nothing real in this world but that which lives in the
heart.... My life has been wrapped up in the obscure little village
where she lives.... Life is only endurable when I tell myself:
'This autumn I shall spend a month beside her.' I should die in
this hell of a Paris if she did not allow me to w