[Footnote 33:  Memoires, II, 420.]

[Footnote 34:  “I do not know how Berlioz has managed to be cut off like this.  He has neither friends nor followers; neither the warm sun of popularity nor the pleasant shade of friendship” (Liszt to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 16 May, 1861).]

[Footnote 35:  In a letter to Bennet he says, “I am weary, I am weary....”  How often does this piteous cry sound in his letters towards the end of his life.  “I feel I am going to die....  I am weary unto death” (21 August, 1868—­six months before his death).]

[Footnote 36:  Letter to Asger Hammerick, 1865.]

Worst of all, in the heart of his misery, there was nothing that comforted him.  He believed in nothing—­neither in God nor immortality.

     “I have no faith....  I hate all philosophy and everything that
     resembles it, whether religious or otherwise....  I am as incapable
     of making a medicine of faith as of having faith in medicine."[37]

     “God is stupid and cruel in his complete indifference."[38]

He did not believe in beauty or honour, in mankind or himself.

“Everything passes.  Space and time consume beauty, youth, love, glory, genius.  Human life is nothing; death is no better.  Worlds are born and die like ourselves.  All is nothing.  Yes, yes, yes!  All is nothing....  To love or hate, enjoy or suffer, admire or sneer, live or die—­what does it matter?  There is nothing in greatness or littleness, beauty or ugliness.  Eternity is indifferent; indifference is eternal."[39]

     “I am weary of life; and I am forced to see that belief in
     absurdities is necessary to human minds, and that it is born in
     them as insects are born in swamps."[40]

[Footnote 37:  Letters to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 July, 21 September, 1862; and August, 1864.]

[Footnote 38:  Memoires, II, 335.  He shocked Mendelssohn, and even Wagner, by his irreligion. (See Berlioz’s letter to Wagner, 10 September, 1855.)]

[Footnote 39:  Les Grotesques de la Musique, pp. 295-6.]

[Footnote 40:  Letter to the Abbe Girod.  See Hippeau, Berlioz intime, p. 434.]

“You make me laugh with your old words about a mission to fulfil.  What a missionary!  But there is in me an inexplicable mechanism which works in spite of all arguments; and I let it work because I cannot stop it.  What disgusts me most is the certainty that beauty does not exist for the majority of these human monkeys."[41]

“The unsolvable enigma of the world, the existence of evil and pain, the fierce madness of mankind, and the stupid cruelty that it inflicts hourly and everywhere on the most inoffensive beings and on itself—­all this has reduced me to the state of unhappy and forlorn resignation of a scorpion surrounded by live coals.  The most I can do is not to wound myself with