champion; and his was the guiding hand that led one through the thick
forest and over the rugged crags of his work.

Not only do you get no help from Berlioz in this way, but he is the
first to lead you astray and wander with you in the paths of error. To
understand his genius you must seize hold of it unaided. His genius was
really great, but, as I shall try to show you, it lay at the mercy of a
weak character.

* * * * *

Everything about Berlioz was misleading, even his appearance. In
legendary portraits he appears as a dark southerner with black hair and
sparkling eyes. But he was really very fair and had blue eyes,[5] and
Joseph d'Ortigue tells us they were deep-set and piercing, though
sometimes clouded by melancholy or languor.[6] He had a broad forehead
furrowed with wrinkles by the time he was thirty, and a thick mane of
hair, or, as E. Legouvé puts it, "a large umbrella of hair, projecting
like a movable awning over the beak of a bird of prey."[7]


[Footnote 5: "I was fair," wrote Berlioz to Bülow (unpublished letters,
1858). "A shock of reddish hair," he wrote in his _Mémoires_, I, 165.
"Sandy-coloured hair," said Reyer. For the colour of Berlioz's hair I
rely upon the evidence of Mme. Chapót, his niece.]

[Footnote 6: Joseph d'Ortigue, _Le Balcon de l'Opéra_, 1833.]

[Footnote 7: E. Legouvé, _Soixante ans de souvenirs_. Legouvé describes
Berlioz here as he saw him for the first time.]