What we might have liked to discover is sex. What we do discover is love. And humor. And truthfulness, elegance, magnanimity, modesty, perceptiveness about himself and others, and countless further virtues that Jacques Barzun well catalogued in his great book of many years ago. But is it not curious that the Mémoires—of a man born in the same year as the creator of Carmen, of a man friendly with such connoisseurs of women as Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Alexandre Dumas père et fils, of a man on intimate terms with the great séducteur who was Franz Liszt—should remain almost speechless in the theaters of eroticism and lust?

Missing

That Berlioz was a man of passion there is no doubt. That he chose to portray himself absent the tones of the flesh speaks to … Chastity? Diffidence? Discomfiture? The right word, I think, is Discretion. Like his music, which can be tempestuous, asymmetrical, unpredictable, but never unpremeditated, Berlioz’s Mémoires—enthusiastic, selective, heterogeneous—always remain composed. They are a counterpoint of sound and silence. “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it,” quipped John Cage in a poem Berlioz might have liked. True, he refers to “the wild enthusiasm of the whores” in his famous description of Paris in the immediate aftermath of the July Revolution. True, he gives a recipe to awaken the desires of Italian chamber maids—“a melancholy expression and white trousers”—in a comment on the life of the prize winner in Rome. True, he mentions his wife’s virginity, to Liszt, in the immediate aftermath of his longdelayed wedding to Harriet Smithson. But of Berlioz’s indulgence with an inamorata in Nice, which put an end to an unnecessary fidelity to an unworthy fiancée, and of his affairs with chorus girls—one whom fate had thrown into his arms, he told Humbert Ferrand, when, in frustration over Harriet Smithson’s hesitancy to marry, he was going abruptly to leave for Berlin; one whom he took as a mistress sometime after the first performance of the Requiem in 1837 (if my suspicion is correct about the identity of the “Mademoiselle Martin” in the chorus); one whom he pursued in St. Petersburg, in the spring of 1847, when his love of love got the better of him—of these women, in the Mémoires, we hear nothing at all.