"My favourite walk, especially when it is raining, really raining
in torrents, is the cemetery of Montmartre, which is near my house.
I often go there; there is much that draws me to it. The day before
yesterday I passed two hours in the cemetery; I found a comfortable
seat on a costly tomb, and I went to sleep.... Paris is to me a
cemetery and her pavements are tomb-stones. Everywhere are memories
of friends or enemies that are dead.... I do nothing but suffer
unceasing pain and unspeakable weariness. I wonder night and day if
I shall die in great pain or with little of it--I am not foolish
enough to hope to die without any pain at all. Why are we not
dead?"[44]

His music is like these mournful words; it is perhaps even more
terrible, more gloomy, for it breathes death.[45] What a contrast: a
soul greedy of life and preyed upon by death. It is this that makes his
life such an awful tragedy. When Wagner met Berlioz he heaved a sigh of
relief--he had at last found a man more unhappy than himself.[46]

[Footnote 44: Letters to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 January, 1859;
30 August, 1864; 13 July, 1866; and to A. Morel, 21 August, 1864.]

[Footnote 45: " ... Qui viderit illas
De lacrymis factas sentiet esse meis,"
wrote Berlioz, as an inscription for his _Tristes_ in 1854.]

[Footnote 46: "One instantly recognises a companion in misfortune; and I
found I was a happier man than Berlioz" (Wagner to Liszt, 5 July,
1855).]

On the threshold of death he turned in despair to the one ray of light