Discretion
If Berlioz’s assertion of his patriotism did not find its way into the Mémoires, other differences between the serialized articles and the definitive text show the former as more circumspect than the latter—something that is of course to be expected in a book designed to appear only after its author had gone to a place eternally shielded from the reprisals and the reviews. In chapter 2, for example, we read of Doctor Berlioz’s probity and independent spirit. We also read of his attempted suicide: “A few years ago, demoralized by excruciating pain, he swallowed at once thirty-two grains of opium. ‘I assure you,’ he later told me on recounting the story, ‘that that was not designed to make me well.’” This paragraph never appeared in Le Monde illustré.
In chapter 14, Berlioz mentions the very serious case of tonsillitis he suffered as a student in Paris, in 1827, when he would have liked his then roommate, Antoine Charbonnel, to bring him something to eat. Nothing doing, Charbonnel was out chasing girls, or, as Berlioz puts it, “Antoine courait les grisettes.” The word grisettes was too risqué for the editors of Le Monde illustré—it refers to working class women with morals of low altitude—so there we read that Charbonnel “courait les aventures.” In chapter 55, we come to Berlioz’s post-Roman career as a composer in Paris: “To finish paying off my wife’s debts, I once more set about the laborious business of arranging a benefit, and after a great deal of exhausting effort succeeded in organizing a joint theatrical and musical evening at the Théâtre-Italien.” Berlioz was forever worried about money, as becomes pointedly evident in his private correspondence. Members of his family, who had objected to his marriage to Harriet Smithson in part because she was penniless, were embarrassed by the slightest public hint that he was in financial distress. It was doubly valorous of Berlioz to excise from Le Monde illustré the offending phrase concerning “les dettes de ma femme.”
When Berlioz met the violinist and conductor Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Guhr, in Frankfurt, in late 1842, he was amused by Guhr’s constant habit of swearing, “Sacré nom de Dieu!” As Guhr pronounced the words, with his particular German accent, Berlioz heard “sacré nom te Tieu,” which appeared in the Journal des débats, and again in chapter 51 [1] of the Mémoires, as “S.N.T.T.” However, when Berlioz was preparing his travel pieces for publication in book form, in 1844, he seems to have wished to intensify the joke by signing his own letter to Guhr, not with “S.N.T.T.,” but with “adieu, adieu, S.N.D.D.” This irreligious profanity was complicated by Johann Christian Lobe’s German translation of Guhr’s expletive as “S.N.Z.T.,” which, because it is repeated, cannot be a misprint. “Sackerment nochmal, zum Teufel!”