In return for the minute and almost interminable work of correcting the score of Donizetti’s opera, I managed to get three hundred francs from Schlesinger, as he could not get any one else to do it.  Besides this, I had to find the time to copy out the orchestra parts of my overture to Faust, which I was still hoping to hear at the Conservatoire; and by the way of counteracting the depression produced by this humiliating occupation, I wrote a short story, Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven (A Pilgrimage to Beethoven), which appeared in the Gazette Musicale, under the title Une Visite a Beethoven.  Schlesinger told me candidly that this little work had created quite a sensation, and had been received with very marked approval; and, indeed, it was actually reproduced, either complete or in parts, in a good many fireside journals.

He persuaded me to write some more of the same kind; and in a sequel entitled Das Ende eines Musikers in Paris (Un Musicien etranger a Paris) I avenged myself for all the misfortunes I had had to endure.  Schlesinger was not quite so pleased with this as with my first effort, but it received touching signs of approval from his poor assistant; while Heinrich Heine praised it by saying that ’Hoffmann would have been incapable of writing such a thing.’  Even Berlioz was touched by it, and spoke of the story very favourably in one of his articles in the Journal des Debats.  He also gave me signs of his sympathy, though only during a conversation, after the appearance of another of my musical articles entitled Ueber die Ouverture (Concerning Overtures), mainly because I had illustrated my principle by pointing to Gluck’s overture to Iphigenia in Aulis as a model for compositions of this class.

Encouraged by these signs of sympathy, I felt anxious to become more intimately acquainted with Berlioz.  I had been introduced to him some time previously at Schlesinger’s office, where we used to meet occasionally.  I had presented him with a copy of my Two Grenadiers, but could, however, never learn any more from him concerning what he really thought of it than the fact that as he could only strum a little on the guitar, he was unable to play the music of my composition to himself on the piano.  During the previous winter I had often heard his grand instrumental pieces played under his own direction, and had been most favourably impressed by them.  During that winter (1839-40) he conducted three performances of his new symphony, Romeo and Juliet, at one of which I was present.

All this, to be sure, was quite a new world to me, and I was desirous of gaining some unprejudiced knowledge of it.  At first the grandeur and masterly execution of the orchestral part almost overwhelmed me.  It was beyond anything I could have conceived.  The fantastic daring, the sharp precision with which the boldest combinations—­almost tangible in their clearness—­impressed me, drove back my own ideas of the poetry of music with brutal