In a recent novel by the popular French journalist Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, Un Héros de passage, a prototypically inexperienced and ambitious young man arrives from the provinces in the capital – the year is 1845 – there to seek fame and fortune. In Paris he makes the acquaintance of a darkly beautiful woman called “Queen Pomaré.” This is not the historical Tahitian Queen whose fifty-year reign over the Polynesian island, from 1827 to 1877, encompassed its establishment as a French protectorate in 1843; it is rather the then fashionable cancan dancer, Élise Sergent, whose exotic and richly bejeweled appearance earned her that piquant and much bandied-about royal appellation.

What has this to do with Berlioz? It happens that in a musical boutade for a friend's album the composer once portrayed himself as chapelmaster to “Queen Pomaré” and composed “in Tahitian words and music” what he called a “morning greeting” to Her Gracious Majesty. I would not be surprised if there were a relationship between this Salut matinal – evidence, like so much else in his oeuvre, of our man's delight in voyages both real and imagined – and the “other” Queen Pomaré, who was the licentious star of the Bal Mabille in the mid-eighteen-forties, when the undated album-leaf may well have been set down. The sobriquet pomaré, like others applied to women of doubtful virtue, was widely known to all who made and attended to art and literature at the time.