Simultaneously with these hit or miss musical studies the boy’s emotional life was heightened at about this time by an incipient love affair, if one can call it so. Hector’s relatives, the Marmions, had a country house near Grenoble in the village of Meylan, where he spent his vacations. Not far away, in a white cottage, surrounded by vineyards and gardens there lived with her mother and sister a tall and exceedingly pretty girl of eighteen, Estelle Duboeuf. At a family garden party, to which Hector and his relations had been invited, Estelle picked him for her partner in some game. Poor Hector was conquered in the twinkling of an eye. When a few minutes later he caught sight of Estelle dancing with his uncle Marmion—who had been a soldier in Napoleon’s armies and cut a superb figure in his gaudy uniform and clanking spurs—the boy flew into a jealous rage, only to have the whole party laugh at him! But Estelle—his “Stella montis”, his “Star of the Mountain”—remained enshrined in his memory for life. Their ways were to separate and they lost track of each other for years. A haggard old man, wracked and buffeted by numberless woes and disappointments, he found her again and sought solace (vainly, as it proved) in an attempt to recapture the shadow of a childhood fancy. His reward was a polite note signed Estelle Fornier—her married name—and a conventional “affectionate greetings”, into which he chose to read meanings that the old lady never remotely intended!
* * *
Hector’s parents determined he should follow in his father’s footsteps and become a physician. The idea revolted him and he struggled against it much as Schumann combated his mother’s wish to make a jurist of a youth with the soul of a poet. Nevertheless, he made as if to comply with the parental will—though one can guess with how many unspoken reservations! And so in the autumn of 1821, he set off for Paris to study medicine. But what fascinated him there were the theatres, the opera houses, the concert halls—things which up to that time he had never enjoyed the opportunity of visiting—and not the loathsome hospitals, anatomical amphitheatres, dissecting rooms and other nauseating horrors. He had felt all along that he was never intended to spend his life “at the bedside of sick people, in hospitals and dissecting chambers”. His father had made the cardinal mistake of “using his love of music as a lever for removing his ‘childish aversion’ to embark on the study of medicine” and, as a reward for working earnestly at osteology had given his refractory son nothing less to the purpose than “a splendid flute, with all the new keys”!
In Paris Hector lost no time visiting the Opéra, the Théâtre Italien, the Théâtre Feydeau, the Ambigu-Comique. He heard Salieri’s “Danaides”, Boieldieu’s “Voitures Versées”, Dalayrac’s “Nina”. Above all, he heard Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride”, and this masterpiece definitely settled the question. His life would be dedicated to music and medicine could go hang! Berlioz the scarlet Romanticist was born at the moment he solemnly made this resolve. It was farewell, henceforth, to the “human charnel house, littered with fragments of limbs, ghastly faces and cloven heads ... where swarms of sparrows fought for scraps and rats in the corners gnawed human vertebrae.” He had, to be sure, grown somewhat hardened after his first appalling impression and had even gotten so far as to “cast a shoulder blade to a great rat which was staring at me with famished eyes”! But the physical reactions he experienced to the music he loved attracted him in the same degree as the horrid displays of the hospital laboratories revolted him. In the theatre listening to Gluck and Spontini “his knees would tremble convulsively, his teeth chatter, he suffered with dizzy spells till he could not stand unsupported, he was bathed in sweat, his scalp contracted, tears choked him, he lost all sensation in fingers and toes, he was seized with chills and hot flashes....” If this was not actually a type of celestial intoxication it was certainly a romantic imagination conveyed through the empurpled diction of the hour!
Down at his home in the Dauphiné Dr. Berlioz gradually got wind of what was happening and endeavored to reason with his son. The latter was frequenting the library of the Conservatoire, voraciously devouring the scores of Gluck, and leaving to those who had a taste for that sort of thing the sanguinary details of the anatomical chamber. And not only did he study the music of Gluck, Méhul and others but he addressed himself to the first two symphonies of Beethoven, at that time as good as unknown in Paris. In the Conservatoire library he met a certain Hyacinthe Christophe Gerono, a pupil of Lesueur, who counseled Hector to study with his affable old master, at one time a great favorite. Lesueur received Hector amiably at the first visit, examined a few compositions of the young man, pronounced them faulty but urged him to undertake some preparatory studies under Gerono, a task he willingly accepted.
In a short time Gerono indoctrinated him so thoroughly in Lesueur’s harmonic system that the latter cordially took him as a pupil. Not that Hector accepted his mentor’s teaching without many unspoken questions, but he quickly decided that the most diplomatic thing to do was to curb whatever impatience he felt and listen in silence. He had already written a choral work, “Le Passage de la Mer Rouge” and a Mass, and though they were youthful attempts and obviously unripe he found it possible to dispense with conventional rules. And now he felt moved to attempt an opera! The obliging Gerono supplied him with a libretto and the fruit of this collaboration was called “Estelle et Némorin,” Estelle Duboeuf doubtless floating before his mind’s eye. Berlioz admits that the music was “feeble” and called the entire work “wishy-washy”. As for the Mass, composed by request for the feast day of the choir children of the Church of Saint Roch, portions of it met the approval of Lesueur. When it came to paying the costs of its performance Hector was in a quandary about raising the necessary 1,200 francs. Finally he borrowed the sum from a friend, Augustin de Pons—a step he was presently to regret though Pons had lent him the money with the best of intentions. The Mass itself was praised and some years later was repeated at the Church of St. Eustache. By this time, however, the composer had become dissatisfied with the work and then burned it together with several juvenile effusions. Meanwhile he had a stormy first meeting with Cherubini, head of the Conservatoire; and he failed to pass a preliminary examination for that august school.
Hearing of this misfortune, Dr. Berlioz, usually slow to wrath, lost his temper and resolved to stop his son’s allowance. If anything Lesueur aggravated the situation by attempting to intercede on his pupil’s behalf. Hector was summoned home and ordered to renounce his ideas of a musical career and take up some other occupation. In spite of the chilling reception the young black sheep encountered there he was astonished and delighted to learn a few days later that the good doctor had once more reconsidered. “After several sleepless nights I have made up my mind”, he gravely told his son. “You shall go to Paris and study music; but only for a time. If after further trials you fail you will, I am sure, acknowledge that I have done what was right, and you will choose some other career. You know what I think of second-rate poets; second-rate artists are no better and it would be a deep sorrow and profound humiliation to me to see you numbered among these useless members of society”. And he swore the youth to secrecy. But the news leaked out and before Hector could take his place in the stage-coach his mother, blazing with anger, confronted him “with flashing eyes and exciting gestures”: “Your father”, she exclaimed, “has been weak enough to allow you to return to Paris and to encourage your mad, wicked plans; but I will not have this guilt on my soul and, once and for all, I forbid your departure ... I beseech you not to persist in your folly! See, I, your mother kneel to you and beg you humbly to renounce it”. And when the appalled Hector begged her to rise she defied him, wildly: “No; I will kneel! So, wretched boy, you refuse? You can stand unmoved with your mother kneeling at your feet? Well, then, go! Go and wallow in the filth of Paris, sully your name and kill your father and me with sorrow and shame! I will not re-enter this house till you have left it. You are my son no longer! I curse you!” Hector had to leave, as he says, “without bidding her good-bye, without another word or a look, and with her curse on my head!”
* * *
Back in Paris his first object was to repay Pons part of the money he owed him for the performance of the Saint Roch mass. He earned a few francs by giving occasional lessons in singing and by teaching flute and guitar. His monthly allowance amounted only to 120 francs, so the repayment was a slow and painful business. Most unhappily Pons, wishing to spare Hector this continuous drain on his purse, resolved to “help” his friend by writing Dr. Berlioz and asking him to settle the remainder of the debt. Pons got his money—but poor Hector lost his allowance!
Somehow he managed to scrape along. He had a tiny room, five flights up, in the Cité, at the corner of the Quai des Orfèvres and the Rue de Harley; he gave up dining in restaurants and confined his diet to dry bread and salt, with now and then raisins or dates. When the weather was favorable he took this meal on the Pont Neuf, beside the statue of Henri IV, watching the passersby or gazing at the muddy waters of the Seine. He worked tirelessly at his music. Cherubini, now apparently mollified, put the youth into Reicha’s class for counterpoint and fugue at the Conservatoire, even while he continued with Lesueur. Hector struck up a life-long friendship with young Humbert Ferrand, who wrote him an opera book, “Les Franc-Juges”—“The Judges of the Secret Court”—which he enthusiastically set to music but of which only the overture remains. It is a fine thing of its type, bearing melodically, instrumentally and harmonically, the unmistakable imprint of Berlioz even to the reminders of Gluck. One of its most striking themes survives from the boyish quintet of Hector’s and anticipates in a fashion the “idée fixe” of the “Symphonie Fantastique”, not very far ahead.