“I am glad to be here, yet my sensations are so curiously confused that I cannot explain them even to myself. I know no one, have no adventures, am utterly alone. Perhaps that is what affects me so oddly. I seem to be not myself but some stranger--some Russian or Englishman--sauntering along the Lung ‘Arno. Berlioz is merely a distant acquaintance. “This cursed throat of mine is still troublesome; it would be the death of me if I would allow it. “I shall not be in Paris till November or December, as I go straight home from here. Many thanks for your invitation to Frankfort; sooner or later I mean to accept it.” _To_ MADAME HORACE VERNET. “LA CÔTE ST ANDRÉ, _July 1832_.--You have set me, Madame, a new and most agreeable task. “An intellectual woman not only desires that I should write her my musings, but undertakes to read them without emphasizing too much their ridiculous side. “It is hardly generous of me to take advantage of your kindness, but are we not all selfish? “For my part, I must own that whenever such a temptation comes I shall fall into it with the utmost alacrity. “I should have done so sooner had I not, on my descent from the Alps, been caught like a ball on the bound and tossed from villa to villa round Grenoble. “My fear was that, on returning to France, I might have to parody Voltaire and say: ‘The more I see of other lands, _the less_ I love my country.’ But all the glories of the glorious kingdom of Naples are powerless beside the ineffable charms of my beautiful vale of the Isère. “Of society, however, I cannot say the same. The advantage is entirely with the absent, who are not ‘always wrong’ in spite of the proverb. “Despite my herculean efforts to turn the conversation, the good folks here _will_ insist on talking art, music and poetry to me, and you may imagine how provincials talk! They have most weird notions, theories and ideas that make an artist’s blood curdle in his veins, and, withal, the calmest assumption of infallibility. “One would think to hear them talk of Byron, Goethe, Beethoven, that they were respectable bootmakers or tailors, with a little more talent than their compeers. “Nothing is good enough, there is no reverence, no respect, no enthusiasm! “Thus living in a crowd, I am utterly, cruelly alone and am parched for want of music. “No longer can I look forward to my evening’s pleasure with Mademoiselle Louise and her piano; no more can I try her sweet patience by demanding and re-demanding those sublime adagios. “You smile, Madame? No doubt you murmur that I know neither what I want nor where I would be--that I am, in fact, half demented.