One of the striking features of Berlioz's Mémoires is the indiscriminateness of his literary imagination. In 1827, Romeo and Juliet infused in Berlioz a dream of Italy, an ideal domain where the heaviness of the commonplace fumes away into sheer volatility of voluptuousness; and four years later Berlioz was allowed to visit Italy—in fact, he was compelled to live there against his will, for winners of the Prix de Rome, the best route to success for a young French artist, were required to live in Rome. By 1831 Italy meant, to Berlioz, not amorous adventure but the absence of amorous adventure, for his beloved (at this moment not Harriet Smithson but a woman named Camille Moke, whom Berlioz would soon come to consider calculating and unreliable) had to stay in Paris. For this reason, and for many others, including the incompetence of Italian musicians, Berlioz found Italy an exasperation and a trial. And yet Italy provided Berlioz with a huge theatre through which he could swagger, experimenting with various transvestisms between himself and dead poets, or characters in literature. He reads Byron in St. Peter's, and is suddenly overwhelmed with Byron envy: