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 attend Gounod’s concerts of sacred music “used to look upon them as a sort of religious orgy.”

The details of Gounod’s picturesque affairs have been denied us.  And the translator of his “Memoires” regrets that he not only kept silence on these points, but seems to have destroyed all the documents.  His “Memoires” are disappointing in every way.  Even his references to his marriage are about as thrilling as a page from a blue book.  His account of his love and his wedding are on this ground really worth quoting, as a curiosity of literature, it being observed how little he has to say of romance, how much of his relatives-in-law.

“Ulysse was produced the 18th of June, 1852.  I had just married a few days before, a daughter of Zimmerman the celebrated professor of the piano at the Conservatory, and to whom is due the fine school from which have come Prudent, Marmontel, Goria, Lefebure-Wely, Ravina, Bizet, and many others.  I became by this alliance the brother-in-law of the young painter Edouard Dubufe, who was already most ably carrying his father’s name, the heritage and reputation which his own son Guilliaume Dubufe, promises brilliantly to maintain.”