few years after the birth of their child, his wife grew jealous, and
accused him of loving elsewhere. He reasoned that he might as well have
the game, if he must have the blame, and thereafter a travelling
companion attended him when he surreptitiously eloped with his music,
and his clothes. In his "Memoires," he paints a dismal picture of his
wife's ill health, her jealous outbreaks, the final separation, and her
eventual death. Then he married again. "I was compelled to do so," is
his suggestive explanation. His new experiment was hardly more
successful; but in eight years his wife was dead.

He found some consolation for his manifold troubles in Liszt's Princess
Sayn-Wittgenstein, and wrote her many letters which La Mara published
under the title of "The Apotheosis of Friendship."

Then at Lyons he met again Her of the pink slippers, now Madame
Fournier, and a widow. He was fifty-seven and she still six years his
elder. He grew ferociously sentimental over her, and almost fainted
when he shook her hand. He tried to reconstruct from the victim of
three-and-sixty years the pink-slippered hamadryad who had haunted him
all his life. He wrote of the meeting:

"I recognised the divine stateliness of her step; but oh, heavens, how
changed she was! her complexion faded, her hair gray. And yet at the
sight of her my heart did not feel one moment's indecision; my whole
soul went out to its idol as though she were still in her dazzling
loveliness. Balzac, nay, Shakespeare himself, the great painter of the
passions, never dreamt of such a thing." [For that reason the
novelty-mad Berlioz tried it. He wrote to her:] "I have loved you. I
still love you. I shall always love you. I have but one aim left in the
world, that of obtaining your affection."

But it was not alone her physical self that had grown old; her
heart-beat, too, was _andante_. She consented to exchange letters; her
pen could correspond with him, but not her passion. She wrote him: "You
have a very young heart. I am quite old. Then, sir, I am six years your
elder, and at my age I must know how to deny myself new friendships."
So Berlioz went his way. His disapproval of Liszt and Wagner alienated
the friendship of even the princess, and his stormy career ended at the
age of sixty-six.

GOUNOD

Charles Gounod wrote as amorous music as ever troubled a human heart.
Like Liszt he was a religious mystic, and Vernon Blackburn has said
that the women who used to att