‘You are writing a symphony about the whole affair. Soon it’ll be public knowledge. Anyway, Camille thinks your passion is inspiring. She says she’d adore somebody to love her with such intensity. I’m doing what I can in that department, but frankly, none of us is in your league, Hector. We wouldn’t survive. Now and then I wonder if it’s killing you. That last letter was hard to read.’
‘It was harder to write.’ Berlioz sighed. ‘When do I see this muse of yours, then?’
‘You already have, I presume. She teaches at the same finishing school you do. While you’re plucking serenades on your guitar in one room, she’s listening to piano scales in another.’
‘That is your Camille? But she is delightful! Those eyes – and a true musician.’
‘Just eighteen, with the world soon to be at her feet. She would be happy for you to introduce yourself as the notoriously famous lover.’
‘Hiller, you are a coquette in a man’s clothing. If you were a woman I would hate you,’ said Berlioz, laughing.
Now and then Berlioz and Camille acknowledged each other as they passed in the corridors of Madame d’Aubré’s school for young ladies. A glance, a nod of the head – that was all, both offered with an undeniable charm. She is a spirit of the air, thought Berlioz, already framing her as an Ariel.
One afternoon there was a knock at his studio door. He was surprised to hear Camille announce herself. She entered, her slim figure outshone by relentless blue eyes.
‘This is unexpected, mademoiselle.’
‘I don’t see why, Monsieur Berlioz. Surely you have noticed the obvious by now. This conversation was always going to happen.’
He had noticed nothing for days except putting his Harriet theme in a country setting midway through the Fantastic Symphony. ‘You will need to enlighten me. I have been distracted by my work of late.’
‘From what I hear your distraction goes back several years, monsieur, and has been a fruitless one – apart from the music you are writing.’
‘Well then, about what were we always going to speak?’
‘The obvious.’
‘Mademoiselle, you will need to place the obvious directly in my sight.’
‘That is why I am here. This is what I am doing.’
‘You are the obvious?’
‘Me, monsieur. You have been so busy radiating passion that you fail to see passion when it comes your way.’
‘Mademoiselle Moke …’ Berlioz said, confused.
‘Camille – please,’ she corrected him. ‘Camille, who is attracted to you. I think I am in love with you.’ She took several steps towards him, her right eyebrow arched, slim pianist’s fingers stroking her neck.
‘This … this … cannot be. You have Hiller …’
‘That is true – but he does not have me. And neither do you have Miss Smithson, as much as you might make her the star of your symphony, Monsieur Berlioz.’
He followed her glance to the scrawl of notes on his desk. Harriet’s theme on woodwinds was plain to see, overlying the tremolando of violins and the bluster of cellos and double basses.
‘You aren’t likely to have her, are you?’ she said, her voice hardening. ‘Not while she is sleeping with her Romeos and her Hamlets.’
‘That’s absurd! You cannot know, cannot speak such a thing.’
‘The backstage world is small, Monsieur Berlioz, even in a big city,’ she said. ‘Word travels fast.’
Berlioz’s eyes narrowed while he relived that conversation in a mail coach rumbling through the Italian night. They stopped for an hour when he and his belongings were transferred to a fresh carriage and horses at a village staging post, and his papers presented to the sleepy clerk.
A tap on the shoulder broke his reverie.
‘Pietrasanta, signore,’ announced the coachman, hesitantly. ‘After here it is dangerous; there are robbers. You have pistols, yes?’
Damn it! – he had noticed.
‘That is good,’ the driver continued. ‘Please, signore – keep them uncapped and hide them under the seat cushions. You may need them on the next leg of the journey, but if they are seen too soon we could be murdered.’
Back on the road, memories prevented sleep. Hector remembered how he fled his room in total despair after Camille’s accusations about Harriet’s love life to roam the countryside north of Paris like a spectre, waking up the next morning in a ditch.
Everything was changed by Camille’s sudden declaration, especially the course of his symphony. Its music now darkened from the pastoral setting to a scene of execution: his own, marching to the scaffold as punishment for Harriet’s murder, a final recollection of her theme cut off by the fall of the guillotine blade. There would be no happy ending to this unrequited love for the now disgraced actress; she returned in the symphony’s final movement as a witch, her distorted theme cackling on a high clarinet.
His feverish creation was an exorcism, rather than an act of revenge. Now that Harriet was gone, the completed symphony still hot on the page, there was room for something new. His studio door had opened; a bewitching sylph had stepped across the threshold – why not?
Later that day, he asked Camille to elaborate further on the ‘obvious’. Within a few weeks, he had approached both her mother and his parents for their consent to marry. In June of 1831, unable to wait even another day for a positive response, the two music teachers eloped, making a short trip to Vincennes and the privacy of a hotel room.
‘So this is what it is like,’ said Berlioz, his heart slowing down after his orgasm.
Camille rolled onto her side, her eyes widening with surprise. ‘Hector, are you telling me this is your first time? But you are twenty-six!’
Berlioz said nothing; he did not want to ask her the same question.
‘Was Harriet anywhere in your thoughts just now?’ There was confidence in her voice.
He smiled and stroked her unfastened black hair.
‘Why would I waste my thoughts on the ordinary? She was never capable of understanding the loftiness of my feelings. I pity and despise her.’
‘Genova, signore!’
Three days after leaving Florence, Berlioz had not spoken again to the driver; neither had he eaten anything, sustained only by his lust for revenge and a few sips of orange juice. The red stubble on his face accentuated his marble complexion, making him look like a sitting cadaver, bloodshot eyes blazing through the window of his carriage.
He was aware of a commotion outside, voices in some frenzied but hushed conversation. There was a timid rapping at his window, a gesture for him to step down onto the cobbled streets. The coachman looked puzzled and embarrassed.
‘Signore, the luggage … it is not all here.’
What? Berlioz rushed to the rear of the carriage, counted the bags in the compartment that extended under his seat, and then reached into a side compartment similar to the one in Florence where he had stashed his lady’s maid disguise for Paris.
The dress was missing.
He had been so lost in thought during the transfer in Pietrasanta more than forty-eight hours before that he had failed to notice some of the items had been left behind. By now, the wife or mistress of some village postal clerk would be proudly showing off her chic new outfit made in the Parisian style, complete with a charming green veil.
Fate be damned, Berlioz thought, wearily checking the contents of his wallet.
‘Does anyone here speak French?’ he called out.
Later, he and his translator exited the door of a local milliner, the fifth they had visited after being told repeatedly that his request was impossible. Inside, the propriétaire counted through the wad of French currency including a forty-franc tip and called together her seamstresses to have an emergency order for a lady’s maid outfit ready for collection at five o’clock that same afternoon. As an added touch of style, the veil would be blue.
His legs like dead weights, Berlioz clambered slowly up a rampart overlooking the Mediterranean to t
ry to refresh himself with sea air. As he stared down, the blue of the water felt as if it was enveloping him, washing away the turbulence of his thoughts, showing him the futility of his striving.
He recalled Macbeth’s verdict on life:
‘… A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’
Yes, I am that idiot, he thought. I am Macbeth, I am King Lear; it is all for nothing.
His legs gave way – the endless blue was coming to meet him, taking him to the purity of nothing – he felt the cleansing rush of sea air, a slight impact, the blue entering him now, his sad tale soon over …
Men were slapping his face, shouting at him in Italian and looking at each other with relief as they saw his chest heave.
He was lying in the bottom of a small fishing boat, his rescuers pointing to the spot on the high wall from where he had fallen – or had he jumped?
‘You went under twice, signore,’ one of them said. ‘We made it to you with a fishhook just in time. Our catch of the day, eh?’ They all laughed.
Bringing him to shore, they left him stretched out in the midday spring sun while he disgorged the blue water of the Mediterranean for an hour.
‘Doesn’t she ever intend to leave us alone?’ Berlioz said to Camille, as they sat side by side on a settee in the Moke household the previous December. Her mother was pretending to make embroidery at a table nearby, her silence dominating the room.
‘Hector, our little elopement all those months ago has tarnished your reputation for trustworthiness just a little,’ Camille whispered. ‘She wonders if your passion is that of a wholly sane man.’ Before he could object, she called to her mother: ‘Maman, you know of course that dear Hector loves me to distraction, don’t you?’
‘Monsieur Berlioz’s distractions are famous around Paris,’ her mother said with what he felt to be a trace of acidity. ‘Certainly, if anyone had told me that this is how lovers behave, I would not believe it to be true.’
‘Merci, madame,’ Berlioz said, unsure as to whether he had been complimented or not, but opting to give her the benefit of the doubt, since he was well on the way to meeting her preconditions for marriage. In the six months since that memorable night in Vincennes he had emerged as France’s most promising young composer, winning the Rome Prize and unveiling his Fantastic Symphony with a spectacular concert just the week before. The new generation of artists, his crowd, loved the hallucinogenic cavalcade of wild emotions, the glittering ball, the sound of distant thunder in the countryside, the blood of a public execution, tolling church bells and the cackling of dancing witches – all describing the real-life love story everyone knew about. It was more than just a concert; it was a night at the theatre of the mind. Even his future mother-in-law was impressed, as was the teenager who accosted Berlioz as soon as the applause had died down.
‘Franz Liszt,’ he announced, idly brushing a mane of lank hair away from either shoulder. ‘You’ve picked up where Beethoven left off. This calls for a drink.’
Camille too was eventually cast in a Berlioz work, floating through the stratosphere of glittering pianos, dancing to the chant of the chorus and soaring through the lightning brass and downpour of violins in his fantasia based on Shakespeare’s Tempest, his Ariel in her true element.
‘The poor French language cannot express how I feel, my darling,’ he said one morning when she had connived to be away from home long enough for a bout of hasty lovemaking in his room. ‘Give me an orchestra of a hundred and a chorus of a hundred and fifty and I will tell you.’
‘That would be lovely, dear Hector,’ she said, reaching down to guide his hand. ‘But it would be ever so much more fun if you could touch me here.’
With Paris now presenting so many opportunities, his Rome Prize felt more like a banishment than a blessing. Berlioz could not understand why the authorities thought it necessary for him to decamp from France for the corked wine of Italian culture when the artistic life at home was providing him with champagne. ‘I can learn more – do more – here,’ he lamented to friends and fiancée. ‘This will stop my career for two years, not start it.’
‘Think of all the music you can write without worrying about money,’ Camille said, not realising that all he would worry about was her.
‘My daughter is right, Monsieur Berlioz,’ said her mother in a tone of voice he detected as becoming cooler by the day. ‘You’ve been given a great honour by the music establishment. Leave for Italy without delay, set the foundations for a profitable career, and everything else will take care of itself.’
Her advice was firm, but she could not meet his eyes; instead, she stared at her daughter, who in turn inspected the ring on her finger.
Berlioz was booked on a coach bound for Rome at month’s end without knowing where his life was going.
‘You’re not going anywhere, Signor Berlioz,’ the policeman said carefully while comparing this mad-haired apparition with the description in his papers. ‘After your revolution in Paris last year, we don’t trust the French not to bring trouble to the Kingdom of Sardinia. You are certainly not going via Torino.’
This was too much for the composer who had in the past few days endured the termination of an engagement, the loss of his luggage, and what any dispassionate observer would have called a suicide attempt, the last two of these mishaps incurred through an attempt to avenge the first. It was as if Macbeth’s idiot whispered that Berlioz’s sad tale was too delightful to end so soon.
‘The gods will not persuade me to spare these baseless women,’ Berlioz said to himself, the aftertaste of brine and vomit still in the back of his throat. ‘I will destroy them – they must and they shall die.’
‘Scusi?’ said the policeman. ‘My French, you understand …’
‘How do I leave this place to return to France?’
‘I will give you a visa for Nizza, signore. You must take the coast road.’
‘It’s twice the distance, but let me have it, for God’s sake. I’ll go via Hell if I have to.’ The long-defunct Catholic part of him suspected the infernal region was his final destination in any case.
His new outfit was ready as promised by the end of the afternoon and stashed into the side compartment of the Nice mail coach when it left Genoa at six. Berlioz, now wearing a change of dry clothes, rehearsed the Parisian denouement again and again, each time painting a little more blood and extruded brain matter onto the grim scene that would greet the gendarmes when they responded to the screams of the servants.
‘Ah! A crime of passion,’ one would say, inspecting the corpse with the pistol still clenched in its hand.
‘Mon Dieu, it is the composer Berlioz, is it not?’ would say the other, whose taste rose above the quotidian into the exalted world of high art and fashion.
‘This is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions,’ the first might say – although as Berlioz conceded within seconds, it was far more likely he might not. ‘The world has lost a great, creative spirit. Who knows what other masterworks he might have written?’
‘And such style to die in that fabulous frock,’ the second would conclude.
Berlioz became aware of something else in his mind as he stared into a stormy night and imagined the bloodshed to come: the sound of an orchestra, advancing upon him as if from a distance and becoming clearer by the second, cellos and basses playing a stentorian tune, falling away with exhaustion at the end of each phrase like the shouting of a very old man.
He searched his memory to find the source. Something from Beethoven, or a fragment from his beloved Gluck? Not that he could recall. It had come from nowhere; to be more precise, it had come from him.
Berlioz realised he was making something up. He was composing.
In the midst of this turmoil, embarking on a mission of murder, his mind flooded with rage, part of him was quietly assembling notes of music as if nothing was the matter.
He sat with his mouth open, eyes darting from side to side, striving to make sense o
f this pointless creativity. What was all this telling him?
There was a jolt when the coach came to a halt so that the driver could attach a drag to the wheels. Berlioz looked out into the turbulent darkness. They had stopped at the point where the Alps plunged into the sea and the road began a steep descent along the face of the cliff. He felt the immensity above him, the sea crashing at its base 600 feet below, the vehicle and its passenger perched on the ledge in between.
The impact of the waves carried up through the rock into the coach, through Berlioz’s feet and legs, all the way to his core, each detonation blowing out another supporting pillar in the weakening construct of his rage, obliterating the image and stature of those he wanted to suffer. Whoosh! Madame Moke’s opportunism turned to mediocrity. Smack! Camille’s manipulative sexuality became the pathetic game of a sad little girl. Bang! Poor Pleyel didn’t deserve a bullet; he would soon be in need of a funeral wreath and a consoling shot of brandy when he realised that all happiness in his life was gone.
There was a final explosion, not from the elements outside, but deep inside Berlioz himself, its plume rising faster and faster, bright colours coursing with a frantic energy. He had only a moment to understand it was the will to live before the ripples reached the top of his head and engulfed him with the most intense exaltation he had ever felt. The only way to expel the air and energy was to whoop into the night, yelling with joy and clutching the seat so as not to be blown out through the roof.
Outside, the driver heard the ‘Ha! Woo-HOO!’ from inside the coach, followed by laughter. Uomo pazzo, he thought. I’ll be happy to hand this one over when we get to Nizza.
When the coach reached Diano Marina down near the shoreline, Berlioz dashed into a café with a new resolve and scrawled a letter to the Villa Medici back in Rome, explaining that he’d had an episode as the victim of an ‘odious crime’. He promised to return, so long as his name had not yet been struck from the student register. He hadn’t yet crossed the frontier into France, and would wait for a reply in Nice.
Symphony of Seduction Page 5