The Blessing of the Daggers from the Huguenots was given with an imposing effect that surpassed my expectations. I wished Meyerbeer could have heard it. It worked upon me so that my teeth chattered and I shook with nervous ague. The concert had to be stopped while they brought me some punch and a change of clothes, and by making a little screen of the harps in their linen covers, I was enabled to dress right before the audience without being seen.
The concert finished triumphantly with the utmost satisfaction to artists and audience but, as I went out, I had the gruesome pleasure of seeing the hospital authorities counting our receipts and walking off with the eighth gross—that is, four thousand francs—which left me, when all was paid, with eight hundred francs for all my trouble and anxiety.
This mad experiment was hardly over when M. Amussat, my anatomy master and friend, called.
“Why, Berlioz!” he said, “what on earth is the matter? You are as yellow as a guinea and look thoroughly overdone.”
He felt my pulse.
“You are on the verge of typhoid and must be bled.”
“Very well, do it now.”
He did, and then said:
“You will please leave Paris at once and go to the Riviera or somewhere south by the sea and forget all these exciting topics. Be off at once.”
With my eight hundred francs I went to Nice. It moved me strangely to see those haunts of thirteen years earlier—the days of my youth.