Caroline, too, sank under the bitterness of the loss. She fell
dangerously ill, and when she recovered she thought only of the
convent; but her father, who had so easily exiled her lover, knew how
to persuade her to marriage. A few months later she became Madame
d'Artigou; they say she gave her husband no affection, and that her
heart was still, and always, Liszt's; while in his heart she was for
ever niched as the young Madonna of his life.

For the present the shock of sacrifice threatened his whole career, and
his life and mind as well. Again the monastery beckoned him, and now it
was his mother's turn to oppose the Church in its effort to engulf this
brilliant artist. After a long struggle he yielded to her, but for a
time he was a recluse, and his melancholy gradually wore out his
health; until at length he was given up for a dying man, and obituary
eulogies actually were published. But as Mark Twain wrote of himself:
"The reports of his death were greatly exaggerated."

When Liszt gave up all hope of entering the Church, he began a restless
orgy of effort for mental diversion; all manner of theories and foibles
allured him.

As Heine said of him, his mind was "impelled to concern itself with all
the needs of mankind, impelled to poke its nose into every pot where
the good God cooks the future." The theatre offered for a time another
form of dissipation than his religious hysteria. He hated concerts, and
compared himself to a conjurer or a clever trick poodle; he took up
with the Revolution of 1830; Saint-Simonianism enmeshed him; later he
fell under the spell of the Abbé Lamennais. Then Paganini came to Paris
and fascinated and frightened Liszt, as he frightened the world with