The time Berlioz bought a dress to commit a murder

In April 1831 Hector Berlioz left Florence with a lady's maid's dress, two pistols and two poisons, and a plan to kill three people in Paris.

The dressmaker was on the Lungarno, the street along the river in Florence. Berlioz walked in and, by his own account, said: "Madame, I want a lady's-maid's outfit by five o'clock--dress, hat, green veil, everything. Money is no object. Can you do it?" She could. When he came back to try it on, she wished him luck with what she assumed was his "little comedy".

It was not a comedy. It was a disguise.

The symphony came first

Four months earlier, on 5 December 1830, Berlioz had premiered the Symphonie fantastique in Paris. Its printed program tells of a young musician who takes opium, dreams that he has killed the woman he loves, and is marched to the scaffold for it. It is a strange thing to have written shortly before trying to do something similar.

That winter he had won the Prix de Rome, which came with a residency in Rome and the expectation that he would stay there. He was also engaged, to a Paris pianist, Marie Moke, known as Camille.

Florence, April 1831

Her letters stopped. He set out for France to find out why, and in Florence, in the first half of April, a letter caught up with him. It was from Camille's mother. Camille was marrying someone else: Camille Pleyel, heir to the Pleyel piano firm.

What happened next is best told by Berlioz, in Katharine Boult's 1903 translation of his Memoirs:

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!

Before he left he scribbled a note across the score of the symphony's ball scene, telling the conductor Habeneck how to finish it if it had to be played "in the absence of the composer". Then he loaded his pistols and put "two little bottles, one of strychnine, the other of laudanum" in his pockets, and spent the rest of the afternoon, as he put it, raging through the streets of Florence "like a mad dog".

The plan

On the road he went over it again. The Memoirs again:

Disguised as the Countess de M.'s lady's-maid, I would go to the house about nine o'clock with an important letter. While it was being read, I would pull out my double-barrelled pistols, kill number one and number two, seize number three by the hair and finish her off likewise; after which, if this vocal and instrumental concert had gathered an audience, I would turn the fourth barrel upon myself. Should it miss fire (such things happen occasionally), I had a final resource in my little bottles.

His next line is "Grand climax! It seems rather a pity it never came off."

It went wrong almost at once. Changing carriages at Pietra Santa, he left the disguise behind. At Genoa he had to start again: "after trying three, succeeded in getting a new outfit."

Genoa

Then comes the part the Memoirs leave out. At Genoa, Berlioz went into the sea. We know because he told Horace Vernet, the director of the French Academy in Rome and so, in effect, his boss, in a letter dated 18 April 1831. In the hberlioz.com translation he describes "a moment of dizziness", says he was "fished out like a salmon", and spent a whole hour being sick afterwards. He doesn't know who pulled him out; people assumed he had fallen from the city ramparts. And he gives Vernet his word of honor, in capitals, that he will not leave Italy.

Nice instead

He kept his word, more or less. Nice then belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia, not to France, so he went there. He stayed about a month, swam, walked in the orange groves, and wrote most of the King Lear overture. "Thus passed the twenty happiest days of my life," he wrote. Then he went back to Florence, and on to Rome.

What happened after

Camille Pleyel became one of the great pianists of the century. Chopin dedicated his three Nocturnes, Op. 9, to her; the first French edition reads "dédiés à Madame Camille Pleyel". In 1833 Berlioz married Harriet Smithson, the actress who had inspired the Symphonie fantastique in the first place. Nobody was shot.

Sources

1. Hector Berlioz, Memoirs, in The Life of Hector Berlioz as Written by Himself in His Letters and Memoirs, tr. Katharine F. Boult (London: Dent, 1903; public domain), Project Gutenberg #62668: link
2. Berlioz to Horace Vernet, 18 April 1831, Correspondance générale no. 217, as translated on hberlioz.com, "Berlioz in Italy: Genoa" (short phrases quoted): link
3. hberlioz.com, "Berlioz in Italy: Florence" (dates in Florence, 1–15 April 1831; return via Florence after Nice)
4. Symphonie fantastique, 1830 program text, IMSLP: link
5. Chopin, Trois nocturnes, Op. 9, first French edition title page (BnF Gallica, via Wikimedia Commons)
6. Bru Zane media base, Grande Ouverture du Roi Lear
7. Images: Wikimedia Commons (BnF Gallica, Rijksmuseum) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access; all public domain or CC0. No credit line required.