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: