ing, withered
the affection which had once been so fervid and passionate. Berlioz
finally separated from his once beautiful and worshiped Harriet
Smithson, but to the very last supplied her wants as fully as he
could out of the meager earnings of his literary work and of musical
compositions, which the Paris public, for the most part, did not care to
listen to. For his son, Louis, the only offspring of this union, Berlioz
felt a devoted affection, and his loss at sea in after-years was a blow
that nearly broke his heart.

IV.

Owing to the unrelenting hostility of Cherubini, Berlioz failed to
secure a professorship at the Conservatoire, a place to which he was
nobly entitled, and was fain to take up with the position of librarian
instead. The paltry wage he eked out by journalistic writing, for the
most part as musical critic of the "Journal des Debats," by occasional
concerts, revising proofs, in a word anything which a versatile and
desperate Bohemian could turn his hand to. In fact, for many years the
main subsistence of Berlioz was derived from feuilleton-writing and
the labors of a critic. His prose is so witty, brilliant, fresh, and
epigrammatic that he would have been known to posterity as a clever
_litterateur_, had he not preferred to remain merely a great musician.
Dramatic, picturesque, and subtile, with an admirable sense of art-form,
he could have become a powerful dramatist, perhaps a great novelist. But
his soul, all whose aspirations set toward one goal, revolted from the
labors of literature, still more from the daily grind of journalistic
drudgery. In that remarkable book, "Memoires de Hector Berlioz," he
has made known his misery, and thus recounts one of his experiences:
"I stood at the window gazing into the gardens, at the heights of
Montmartre, at the setting sun; reverie bore me a thousand leagues from
my accursed comic opera. And when, on turning, my eyes fell upon the
accursed title at the head of the accursed sheet, blank still, and
obstinately awaiting my word, despair seized upon me. My guitar rested
against the table; with a kick I crushed its side. Two pistols on the
mantel stared at me with great round eyes. I regarded them for
some time, then beat my forehead with clinched hand. At last I wept
furiously, like a schoolboy unable to do his theme. The bitter tears
were a relief. I turned the pistols toward the wall; I pitied my
innocent guitar, and sought a few chords, which were given