an outlet. It is not a state of spleen, though that may follow later ...
spleen is rather the congealing of all these emotions--the block of ice.
Even when I am calm I feel a little of this '_isolement_' on Sundays in
summer, when our towns are lifeless, and everyone is in the country; for
I know that people are enjoying themselves away from me, and I feel
their absence. The _adagio_ of Beethoven's symphonies, certain scenes
from Gluck's _Alceste_ and _Armide_, an air from his Italian opera
_Telemacco_, the Elysian fields of his _Orfeo_, will bring on rather bad
attacks of this suffering; but these masterpieces bring with them also
an antidote--they make one's tears flow, and then the pain is eased. On
the other hand, the _adagio_ of some of Beethoven's sonatas and Gluck's
_Iphigénie en Tauride_ are full of melancholy, and therefore provoke
spleen ... it is then cold within, the sky is grey and overcast with
clouds, the north wind moans dully...." _(Mémoires_, I, 246).]

Who does not know his passion for Henrietta Smithson? It was a sad
story. He fell in love with an English actress who played Juliet (Was it
she or Juliet whom he loved?). He caught but a glance of her, and it was
all over with him. He cried out, "Ah, I am lost!" He desired her; she
repulsed him. He lived in a delirium of suffering and passion; he
wandered about for days and nights like a madman, up and down Paris and
its neighbourhood, without purpose or rest or relief, until sleep
overcame him wherever it found him--among the sheaves in a field near
Villejuif, in a meadow near Sceaux, on the bank of the frozen Seine near
Neuilly, in the snow, and once on a table in the Café Cardinal, where he
slept for five hours, to the great alarm of the waiters, who thought he
was dead.[17] Meanwhile, he was told slanderous gossip about Henrietta,
which he readily believed. Then he despised her, and dishonoured her
publicly in his _Symphonie fantastique_, paying homage in his bitter
resentment to Camille Moke, a pianist, to whom he lost his heart without