More than a score of years have passed since Berlioz died, in Paris, that city which was the object of his youthful dreams, the scene of his bitter struggles and his sublime defeats. It was in the midst of those Parisians, who had accorded him little more than mockery and scorn, that he had wished to die, weighed down by sadness and discouragement, supported by a few intimate friends and rare disciples. Moreover, did he not foresee that sad end when writing the following lines which subsequent events proved only too true? “It was about that time of my academic life that I experienced again the attack of a cruel malady (moral, nervous, imaginary, whatever you like) which I will call sickness of isolation, and which will kill me some day.... This is not spleen, though it leads to that later on; it is the boiling away, the evaporation of the heart, the senses, the brain, the nervous fluid. Spleen is the congelation of all that, it is the block of ice.” Therefore death was for him a blessed release. For some years before, there remained of Hector Berlioz nothing but an earthly frame, an inert and suffering body; the moral being was crushed. The fall of _The Trojans_ was the rudest possible shock to that nature so well tempered to receive it; hitherto the proud artist had returned blow for blow; never had a defeat, however grave, completely overthrown him. For the first time, in witnessing the downfall of the work of his predilection, the athlete had faltered. He had laid down his arms and thenceforth, weary of life and of the struggle, had contented himself with the hollow diversions which the capital offered him, “preoccupied solely with material interests, inattentive and indifferent to that which impassions poets and artists, having a morbid taste for scandal and mockery, laughing with a dry and mirthless laugh when this strange taste is gratified.” A certain heartache, a vague suffering of the soul, vain regrets, preyed upon him at least as much as bodily ills; his shade alone wandered among us, dumb, taciturn, _isolated_, and one beautiful morning in the month of March it vanished.