It was not till December, 1827, that the actress first had a fleeting glimpse of her worshipper. This happened quite by chance at a rehearsal for a benefit performance at the Opéra-Comique where Hector was to offer an overture of his and where some of the English actors were to perform a couple of Shakespearian scenes. By this time he had begun to write her letters, to which she never replied, for they frightened her and she presently ordered her maid not to accept any more from the postman. When Berlioz at a rehearsal caught sight of Henrietta talking to her colleagues backstage he uttered a loud cry and rushed from the theatre, wildly wringing his hands. Thinking she had to do with a madman the actress begged her associates to watch him closely, for “she did not like the look of his eyes”. The mop of red hair that surmounted his head like an umbrella, his gaunt visage, fiery appearance and generally hysterical demeanor must have given her reason for alarm and she probably breathed more freely when she left Paris for Holland.
Everyone who has interested himself even slightly in Berlioz is doubtless familiar with the lurid fiction the composer invented to form the “plot” of the “Fantastic Symphony”. In this “Episode in the Life of an Artist” a high-strung youth is represented as seeking release from the torments of disappointed love by means of an overdose of opium. Instead of killing him the drug afflicts him with a succession of perturbing, not to say terrifying, grotesque or macabre visions. Through each of them there moves the image of the Beloved, musically-represented by a recurrent string of notes—a sort of representative theme, or “idée fixe”. The youth is a plaything of passions, reveries, jealousies, frenzies at the outset; then he sees his idol, apparently indifferent to him, the central figure at a brilliant ball; amorous thoughts mingle in his mind with dark presentiments as he wanders over the countryside, rendered more melancholy by the pipings on rustic instruments of two love-sick shepherds, till thunderclaps interrupt their mournful dialogue. Then he dreams he has murdered his beloved and is marched to the scaffold; after which his disembodied spirit becomes the sport of a noisome rout of demons, witches, succubi and other infernal things, among whom the cherished one, now a devilish harridan, pursues him, while the Dies Irae resounds blasphemously in his ears.