nd 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).]

Who does not know his passion for Henrietta Smithson? It was a sa