[Footnote 25:  In a note in the Memoires, Berlioz publishes a letter of Mendelssohn’s which protests his “good friendship,” and he writes these bitter words:  “I have just seen in a volume of Mendelssohn’s Letters what his friendship for me consisted of.  He says to his mother, in what is plainly a description of myself, ’——­ is a perfect caricature, without a spark of talent ... there are times when I should like to swallow him up’” (Memoires, II, 48).  Berlioz did not add that Mendelssohn also said:  “They pretend that Berlioz seeks lofty ideals in art.  I don’t think so at all.  What he wants is to get himself married.”  The injustice of these insulting words will disgust all those who remember that when Berlioz married Henrietta Smithson she brought as dowry nothing but debts; and that he had only three hundred francs himself, which a friend had lent him.]

[Footnote 26:  Liszt repudiated him later.]

[Footnote 27:  Written in an article on the Ouverture de Waverley (Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik).]

Wagner, who treated his symphonies with scorn before he had even read them,[28] who certainly understood his genius, and who deliberately ignored him, threw himself into Berlioz’s arms when he met him in London in 1855.  “He embraced him with fervour, and wept; and hardly had he left him when The Musical World published passages from his book, Oper und Drama, where he pulls Berlioz to pieces mercilessly."[29] In France, the young Gounod, doli fabricator Epeus, as Berlioz called him, lavished flattering words upon him, but spent his time in finding fault with his compositions,[30] or in trying to supplant him at the theatre.  At the Opera he was passed over in favour of a Prince Poniatowski.

[Footnote 28:  Wagner, who had criticised Berlioz since 1840, and who published a detailed study of his works in his Oper und Drama in 1851, wrote to Liszt in 1855:  “I own that it would interest me very much to make the acquaintance of Berlioz’s symphonies, and I should like to see the scores.  If you have them, will you lend them to me?”]

[Footnote 29:  See Berlioz’s letter, cited by J. Tiersot, Hector Berlioz et la societe de son temps, p. 275.]

[Footnote 30:  Romeo, Faust, La Nonne sanglante.]

He presented himself three times at the Academy, and was beaten the first time by Onslow, the second time by Clapisson, and the third time he conquered by a majority of one vote against Panseron, Vogel, Leborne, and others, including, as always, Gounod.  He died before the Damnation de Faust was appreciated in France, although it was the most remarkable musical composition France had produced.  They hissed its performance?  Not at all; “they were merely indifferent”—­it is Berlioz who tells us this.  It passed unnoticed.  He died before he had seen Les Troyens played in its entirety, though it was one of the noblest works of the French