Hector Berlioz

Fire, air and water take three of his ten planets each, with a single one in earth, and four of the ten are cardinal with four mutable. The Sun, Mercury and Mars sit inside four and a quarter degrees of Sagittarius. Nothing in this chart was retrograde. The record says Berlioz wrote the Symphonie fantastique at twenty six, about an artist poisoning himself over a woman he had not met, and that he worked as a music critic for thirty years because the music did not pay.

Two contacts here run to Saturn and both are about not being wanted. Venus sits square it at just over a quarter of a degree, warmth meeting a wall: feeling unworthy, delay or coldness in affection, and a person who withholds first in order not to be refused. The Moon sits in mild friction with it at under half a degree, need meeting refusal: loneliness, and difficulty asking for anything. The record's central fact is a symphony about a woman he had not met, which is love conducted at a distance that makes refusal impossible.

That is about as close as this vocabulary comes to describing a specific act, and the act is in the record rather than in the chart: somebody wrote a large piece of music about a person he had not spoken to. Mercury sits a fifth of a turn from Saturn at under three tenths of a degree, structured thinking without strain: organisation, patience and long concentration, which is thirty years of criticism written to pay for composing. The record gives the reason in the same sentence, and the reason is money.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Jupiter at under half a degree, scale outrunning accuracy: exaggeration, and promising more than was checked, which in the composer of that particular symphony is a reading about orchestra sizes as much as about character. A single planet in earth, in a man the record says could not make the music pay, is a count worth one clause. The Moon's sign is certain at eighteen degrees of Scorpio, where everything matters too much for anything to be casual. He died at Paris on 8 March 1869, at sixty five. The transiting Sun stood in easy contact with his natal Moon at five hundredths of a degree that day, Jupiter in easy contact with his natal Mars at just over a fifth, and Mars with its own natal place at under a third. The Moon was at its last quarter and twenty per cent lit.