Troyens or the “nuit sereine" of Romeo et Juliette.  And compare this Virgilian affection with Wagner’s sensual raptures.  Does it mean that Berlioz could not love as well as Wagner?  We only know that Berlioz’s life was made up of love and its torments.  The theme of a touching passage in the Introduction of the Symphonic fantastique has been recently identified by M. Julien Tiersot, in his interesting book,[14] with a romance composed by Berlioz at the age of twelve, when he loved a girl of eighteen “with large eyes and pink shoes”—­Estelle, Stella mentis, Stella matutina.  These words—­perhaps the saddest he ever wrote—­might serve as an emblem of his life, a life that was a prey to love and melancholy, doomed to wringing of the heart and awful loneliness; a life lived in a hollow world, among worries that chilled the blood; a life that was distasteful and had no solace to offer him in its end.[15] He has himself described this terrible “mal de l’isolement,” which pursued him all his life, vividly and minutely.[16] He was doomed to suffering, or, what was worse, to make others suffer.

[Footnote 13:  Memoires, I, 11.]

[Footnote 14:  Julien Tiersot, Hector Berlioz et la societe de son temps, 1903, Hachette.]

[Footnote 15:  See the Memoires, I, 139.]

[Footnote 16:  “I do not know how to describe this terrible sickness....  My throbbing breast seems to be sinking into space; and my heart, drawing in some irresistible force, feels as though it would expand until it evaporated and dissolved away.  My skin becomes hot and tender, and flushes from head to foot.  I want to cry out to my friends (even those I do not care for) to help and comfort me, to save me from destruction, and keep in the life that is ebbing from me.  I have no sensation of impending death in these attacks, and suicide seems impossible; I do not want to die—­far from it, I want very much to live, to intensify life a thousandfold.  It is an excessive appetite for happiness, which becomes unbearable when it lacks food; and it is only satisfied by intense delights, which give this great overflow of feeling an outlet.  It is not a state of spleen, though that may follow later ... spleen is rather the congealing of all these emotions—­the block of ice.  Even when I am calm I feel a little of this ‘isolement’ on Sundays in summer, when our towns are lifeless, and everyone is in the country; for I know that people are enjoying themselves away from me, and I feel their absence.  The adagio of Beethoven’s symphonies, certain scenes from Gluck’s Alceste and Armide, an air from his Italian opera Telemacco, the Elysian fields of his Orfeo, will bring on rather bad attacks of this suffering; but these masterpieces bring with them also an antidote—­they make one’s tears flow, and then the pain is eased.  On the other hand, the adagio of some of Beethoven’s sonatas and Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride are full of melancholy, and therefore provoke spleen ... it is then cold within, the sky is grey and overcast with clouds, the north wind moans dully....” (Memoires, I, 246).]