While at Florence, Berlioz relates in his Memoirs, he received a letter from the mother of Camille, the woman he loved, informing him of Camille's marriage to another. "In two minutes my plans were laid. I must hurry to Paris to kill two guilty women and one innocent man; for, this act of justice done, I too must die." Accordingly he loads his pistols, supplies himself with a disguise as a lady's maid, so as to be able to penetrate into the guilty household, and puts into his pockets "two little bottles, one of strychnine, the other of laudanum." While awaiting the departure of the diligence he "rages up and down the streets of Florence like a mad dog." Later, as the diligence is traversing a wild mountain road, he suddenly lets out a "'Ha!' so hoarse, so savage, so diabolic that the startled driver bounded aside as if he had indeed a demon for his fellow-traveller." But on reaching Nice he is so enchanted by the climate and environment that he not only forgets his errand, but spends there "the twenty happiest days" of his life! There are times, one must admit, when it is an advantage to be temperamental.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism