When their marriage was solemnized at the British Embassy (with Liszt as best man) Hector had exactly two hundred francs and Harriet—a mountain of debts! For their honeymoon they could travel no further than the suburb of Vincennes. The wedding trip, according to the groom, was “a masterpiece of love”. All the same, he soon had chances to notice that his bride was not in the least musical; likewise, that she harbored a streak of jealousy. Not even the birth of their son, Louis, on August 15, 1834, at their home on the hill of Montmartre helped smooth this unhappy state of affairs, which was to deepen as time went on. Harriet grew violently opposed to her husband’s traveling, though Berlioz claims that “a mad and for some time an absolutely groundless jealousy was at the bottom of it”.
Was it “absolutely groundless”? The composer’s intimate associate, Ernest Legouvé, has let us into many secrets about the rift in the lute in his book “Soixante Ans de Souvenirs”. The blond Irishwoman, some years older than her husband, was gradually losing her looks, her failures as an actress had for some time increasingly embittered her and she presently took to drink. The more the sentiments of the formerly so ardent Hector “changed to a correct and calm good fellowship”, says Legouvé, “the more his wife became imperious in her exigencies and indulged in violent recriminations that were unfortunately justified. Berlioz, whose position as critic and as composer producing his own works made the theatre his real world, found there occasions for lapses that would have proved too much for stronger heads than his; moreover, his reputation as a misunderstood great artist endowed him with a halo that easily tempted his female interpreters to become his consolers. Madame Berlioz searched his feuilletons for hints of his infidelities. And not only there: fragments of intercepted letters, drawers indiscreetly opened, brought her revelations just sufficient to make her beside herself without more than half-illuminating her. Her jealousy was always outdistanced by the facts. Berlioz’s heart went so fast that she could not keep pace with it; when, after so much research, she lighted upon some object of his passion, _that_ particular passion was no more; and then, it being easy for him to prove his innocence at the moment, the poor woman was as abashed as a dog which after having followed a track for half an hour, arrives at the lair only to find the quarry already gone”. Yet the jealous instincts of the once lovely Ophelia and Juliet were, in fact, only too sound and, if her shrewishness increased by leaps and bounds, she had no little cause for it.