Читать книгу The Life of Hector Berlioz as Written by Himself in His Letters and Memoirs - Hector Berlioz - Страница 11

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The hostility of my people had somewhat died down, thanks to the success of my mass, but, naturally another reverse started it with renewed fury.

In the 1826 preliminary examination of candidates for admission to the Institute I was hopelessly plucked. Of course my father heard of it, and promptly wrote that, if I persisted in staying on in Paris, my allowance would stop.

My dear master kindly wrote asking him to reconsider his letter, saying that my eventual success was certain, since I oozed music at every pore. But, by ill luck, he brought in religious arguments—about the worst thing he could have done with my free-thinking father, whose blunt—almost rude—answer could not but wound Lesueur on his most susceptible side. From the beginning:

“Monsieur, I am an atheist,” the rest may be guessed. The forlorn hope of gaining my end by personal pleading sent me back to La Côte, where I was received frostily and left to my own reflections for some days, during which I wrote to Ferrand:

“No sooner away from the capital than I want to talk to you. My journey was tiresome as far as Tarare, where I began a conversation with two young men, whom I had, so far, avoided, thinking they looked dilettanti. They told me they were artists, pupils of Guérin and Gros, so I told them I was a pupil of Lesueur. They said all sorts of nice things of him, and one of them began humming a chorus from the Danaïdes.

“The Danaïdes!” I cried, “then you are not a mere trifler?”

“Not I,” he answered; “have I not heard Dérivis and Madame Branchu thirty-four times as Danaüs and Hypermnestra?”

“O-o-oh!” and we fell upon each other’s neck.

“I know Dérivis,” said the other man.

“And I Madame Branchu.”

“Lucky fellows!” I said. “But how is it that, since you are not professional musicians, you have not caught Rossini fever and turned your backs on nature and common sense?”

“Well, I suppose it is because, being used to seeking all that is grandest and best in nature for our pictures, we recognise the same spirit in Gluck and Salieri, and so turn our backs on fashionable music.”

“Blessed people! Such as they are alone worthy of being allowed to listen to Iphigenia!”

Again my parents returned to the charge, telling me to choose my profession, since I refused to be a doctor. Again I replied that I could and would only be a musician and must return to Paris to study.

“Never,” said my father, “you may give up that idea at once.”

I was crushed; with paralysed brain I sank into a torpor from which nothing roused me. I neither ate nor spoke nor answered when spoken to, but spent part of the day wandering in the woods and fields and the rest shut up in my own room. I was mentally and morally dying for want of air. Early one morning my father came to my bedside:

“Get up and come to my study,” he said, “I want to talk to you.” He was grave and sad, not angry.

“I have decided, after many sleepless nights, that you shall go back to Paris, but only for a time. If you should fail on further trial, I think you will do me the justice to own that I have done all that can be expected, and will consent to try some other career. You know my opinion of second-rate poets—every sort of mediocrity is contemptible—and it would be a deadly humiliation to feel that you were numbered among the failures of the world.”

Without waiting to hear more, I promised all he wished. “But,” he continued, “since your mother’s point of view is diametrically opposed to mine, I desire, in order to avoid trouble, that you do not mention this, and that you start for Paris secretly.”

But it was impossible to hide this sudden bound from utter despair to delirious joy and Nanci, my sister, with many promises not to tell, wormed my secret out of me. Of course she kept it as well as I did, and by nightfall, everyone, including my mother, knew my plans.

Now it will hardly be believed that there are still people in France who look upon anyone connected with theatres or theatrical art as doomed to everlasting perdition, and since, according to French ideas, music hardly exists outside a theatre, it, too, shares the same fate.

Apropos of this I nearly made Lesueur die of laughing over a reply of one of my aunts.

We were arguing on this very point, and I said at last:

“Come, Auntie, I believe you would object to have even Racine a member of your family!”

“Well, Hector,” she said seriously, “we must be respectable before everything.”

Lesueur insisted that such sentiments could only emanate from an elderly maiden aunt, in spite of my asseverations that she was young and as pretty as a flower.

Needless to say, my mother believed I was setting my feet in the broad road that led not only to destruction in the next world, but to social ruin in this. I quickly saw by her wrathful face that she knew all, and did my best to slink out of her way, but it was useless. Trembling with rage and using “you” instead of the old familiar “thou,” she said:

“Hector, since your father countenances your folly I must speak and save you from this mortal sin. You shall not go; I forbid it. See, here I—your mother—kneel at your feet to beg you humbly to give up this mad design and——”

“Mother! mother!” I interrupted, “I cannot bear it! For pity’s sake don’t kneel to me.”

But she knelt on, looking up at me as I stood in miserable silence, and finally she said:

“You refuse, wretched boy? Then go! Drag our honoured name through the fetid mud of Paris; kill your parents with shame and disgrace. Curses on you! You are no more my son, and never again will I look upon your face.”

Could narrow-mindedness towards Art and provincial prejudice go farther? I truly believe that my hatred of these mediæval doctrines dates from that horrible day.

But that was not the end of the trial.

My mother hurried off to our little country house, Le Chuzeau, and when the time of my departure came my father begged me to make one final effort at reconciliation. We all went to Le Chuzeau, where we found her reading in the orchard. As we drew near she fled. We waited, we hunted, my father called her, my sisters and I cried bitterly, but all in vain. Without a kind word or look from my mother, with her curse upon my head, I started on my life’s career.