The life of Hector Berlioz as written by himself in his letters and memoirsBerlioz, Hector
General
The life of Hector Berlioz as written by himself in his letters and memoirs
Berlioz, Hector
Berlioz, Hector, 1803-1869; Composers -- France -- Biography
Again and again I went over Henriette’s troubles and their crushing
weight bore me to the earth. Her losses before our marriage, her
accident, the fiasco of her second appearance, her lost beauty and
renown, our home quarrels, her jealousy--not, in the end, without
cause--our separation, her son’s absence, her helplessness and dreary
years of retrospection, of contemplating approaching death and oblivion.
Oh, the pity of it! It turns my brain.
Shakespeare! Shakespeare! Thou alone couldst have understood us both,
thou alone couldst have pitied us--poor children of Art--loving, yet
wounding each other through our love! Thou art our God, if that other
God sits aloof in sublime indifference to our torments. Thou art our
father. Help us! Save us!
De profundis ad te clamo!
Alone I went about my sorrowful task.
The Protestant pastor lived at the other side of Paris and I went to
him that evening. As my cab passed the Odéon I thought of how, in that
theatre twenty-six years before, my poor dead wife had burst like a
meteor upon Paris and had come forward, trembling and awed at her own
success, to receive the plaudits of all that was best and brightest in
France. Ophelia! Ophelia!
Through that door I saw her pass to a rehearsal of _Othello_. I was
nothing to her then. She would have thought the prophet mad who pointed
out a worn, distraught, unknown youth and said:
“Behold your husband!”
Yet he it is, my poor Ophelia, he who loved and suffered with you, who
tends you on this last long journey.
“... Forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.”
Shakespeare! Shakespeare! The waters have gone over me. Father! Father!
where art thou?
* * * * *
Next day, out of love for me, came d’Ortigue, Brizeux, Léon de Wailly,
some artists brought by good Baron Taylor and other kind friends to
accompany Henriette to her last rest. Twenty-five years earlier all
intellectual Paris would have been there--now, he, who loved her and
had not the courage to go with her to the little Montmartre God’s-acre,
sits and weeps alone in her deserted garden, and her young son wanders
afar on the dreary ocean.
They turned her face towards the north, to that England she never saw
again, and her humble grave bears only--
Henriette Constance Berlioz-Smithson, born at Ennis, Ireland, died at
Montmartre, 3rd March 1854.
The papers barely noticed her death, but Jules Janin remembered and
wrote in the _Débats_:
“These stage divinities how soon they pass!
“How short a time it seems since we sat with Juliet on that balcony
above the Verona road. Juliet, so fair, so ethereal, listening
dreamily as Romeo speaks, her golden voice vibrating with the
undying poetry of Shakespeare, the whole world bound by her magic
spells!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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