Returning to Paris, he found the city in a spasm of enthusiasm over Shakespeare, especially over the Irish actress Smithson, whom he had worshipped from afar, before he had gone to Rome, thinking that he only worshipped Shakespeare through the prophetess.  The remembrance of her had inspired him to write his “Lelio” in Italy.  When he was again in Paris, he gave a concert, played the kettle-drums for his own symphony, and through a friend managed to secure the attendance of Miss Smithson.  She recognised in him the stranger who had dogged her steps in the years before.  The poet Heine was at the concert, and his description of the scene is as follows: 

“It was thus I saw him for the first time, and thus he will always remain in my memory.  It was at the Conservatoire de Musique when a big symphony of his was given, a bizarre nocturne, only here and there relieved by the gleam of a woman’s dress, sentimentally white, fluttering to and fro—­or by a flash of irony, sulphur yellow.  My neighbour in my box pointed out to me the composer, who was sitting at the extremity of the hall in the corner of the orchestra playing the kettle-drums.

“’Do you see that stout English woman in the proscenium?  That is Miss Smithson; for nearly three years Berlioz has been madly in love with her, and it is this passion that we have to thank for the wild symphony we are listening to to-day.’

“Every time that her look met his, he struck his kettle-drum like a maniac.”

Then he married the plump enchantress and knew a brief happiness.  But he gradually woke to the fact that the dowry she brought him was mainly ill-luck, bad temper, and a monument of debts which she acquired by a new series of Shakespeare performances under her own management.  By this time Paris had forgotten the barbarian Shakespeare and ridiculed the former queen of the stage.  Then Madame Berlioz fell from a carriage and broke her leg.  This took her permanently from the stage, where she was no longer a success.  A few managerial ventures brought her a handsome bankruptcy.  Berlioz gave benefit concerts and wrote fiendishly for the papers to pay her debts, and always provided for her.  But there was no more happiness for the two, though there was a child.  I have said that Miss Smithson brought Berlioz a dowry of bad luck and bad temper.  The worldly goods with which Berlioz had her endowed, were no better.  He had begun the marriage with “300 francs borrowed from a friend and a new quarrel with my parents.”  He also contributed a temper which is one of the most brilliant in history.

A 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.