Paris—­is lamentable and ridiculous.  Whether he attracts one or not, a thimbleful of some of his work, a single part in one of his works, a little bit of the Fantastique or the overture of Benvenuto, reveal more genius—­I am not afraid to say it—­than all the French music of his century.  I can understand people arguing about him in a country that produced Beethoven and Bach; but with us in France, who can we set up against him?  Gluck and Cesar Franck were much greater men, but they were never geniuses of his stature.  If genius is a creative force, I cannot find more than four or five geniuses in the world who rank above him.  When I have named Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Haendel, and Wagner, I do not know who else is superior to Berlioz; I do not even know who is his equal.

He is not only a musician, he is music itself.  He does not command his familiar spirit, he is its slave.  Those who know his writings know how he was simply possessed and exhausted by his musical emotions.  They were really fits of ecstasy or convulsions.  At first “there was feverish excitement; the veins beat violently and tears flowed freely.  Then came spasmodic contractions of the muscles, total numbness of the feet and hands, and partial paralysis of the nerves of sight and hearing; he saw nothing, heard nothing; he was giddy and half faint.”  And in the case of music that displeased him, he suffered, on the contrary, from “a painful sense of bodily disquiet and even from nausea."[54]

The possession that music held over his nature shows itself clearly in the sudden outbreak of his genius.[55] His family opposed the idea of his becoming a musician; and until he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old his weak will sulkily gave way to their wishes.  In obedience to his father he began his studies in medicine at Paris.  One evening he heard Les Danaides of Salieri.  It came upon him like a thunderclap.  He ran to the Conservatoire library and read Gluck’s scores.

[Footnote 54:  A travers chants, pp. 8-9.]

[Footnote 55:  In truth, this genius was smouldering since his childhood; it was there from the beginning; and the proof of it lies in the fact that he used for his Ouverture des Francs-Juges and for the Symphonie fantastique airs and phrases of quintets which he had written when twelve years old (see Memoires, I, 16-18).]

He forgot to eat and drink; he was like a man in a frenzy.  A performance of Iphigenie en Tauride finished him.  He studied under Lesueur and then at the Conservatoire.  The following year, 1827, he composed Les Francs-Juges; two years afterwards the Huit scenes de Faust, which was the nucleus of the future Damnation;[56] three years afterwards, the Symphonie fantastique (commenced in 1830).[57] And he had not yet got the Prix de Rome!  Add to this that in 1828 he had already ideas for Romeo et Juliette, and that he had written a part of Lelio in 1829.  Can one find elsewhere a more dazzling musical debut?  Compare that of Wagner who, at the same age, was shyly writing Les Fees, Defense d’aimer, and Rienzi.