But parental resolution carried the day, and, after he had finished the preliminary course of study, he was ordered up to Paris to join the army of medical students.  So at the age of nineteen we find him lodged in the Quartier Latin.  His first introduction to medical studies had been unfortunate.  On entering a dissecting-room he had been so convulsed with horror as to leap from the window, and rush to his lodgings in an agony of dread and disgust, whence he did not emerge for twenty-four hours.  At last, however, by dint of habit he became somewhat used to the disagreeable facts of his new life, and, to use his own words, “bade fair to add one more to the army of bad physicians,” when he went to the opera one night and heard “Les Danaides,” Salieri’s opera, performed with all the splendid completeness of the Academie Royale.  This awakened into fresh life an unquenchable thirst for music, and he neglected his medical studies for the library of the Conservatoire, where he learned by heart the scores of Gluck and Rameau.  At last, on coming out one night from a performance of “Iphigenie,” he swore that henceforth music should have her divine rights of him, in spite of all and everything.  Henceforth hospital, dissecting-room, and professor’s lectures knew him no more.

But to get admission to the Conservatoire was now the problem; Berlioz set to work on a cantata with orchestral accompaniments, and in the mean time sent the most imploring letters home asking his father’s sanction for this change of life.  The inexorable parent replied by cutting off his son’s allowance, saying that he would not help him to become one of the miserable herd of unsuccessful musicians.  The young enthusiast’s cantata gained him admission to the classes of Le Sueur and Reicha at the Conservatoire, but alas! dire poverty stared him in the face.  The history of his shifts and privations for some months is a sad one.  He slept in an old, unfurnished garret, and shivered under insufficient bedclothing, ate his bread and grapes on the Pont Neuf, and sometimes debated whether a plunge into the Seine would not be the easiest way out of it all.  No mongrel cur in the capital but had a sweeter bone to crunch than he.  But the young fellow for all this stuck to his work with dogged tenacity, managed to get a mass performed at St. Roch church, and soon finished the score of an opera, “Les Francs Juges.”  Flesh and blood would have given way at last under this hard diet, if he had not obtained a position in the chorus of the Theatre des Noveauteaus.  Berlioz gives an amusing account of his going to compete with the horde of applicants—­butchers, bakers, shop-apprentices, etc.—­each one with his roll of music under his arm.