Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
MASSIMILLA DONI
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell and James Waring
DEDICATION
To Jacques Strunz.
MY DEAR STRUNZ:--I should be ungrateful if I did not set your name
at the head of one of the two tales I could never have written but
for your patient kindness and care. Accept this as my grateful
acknowledgment of the readiness with which you tried--perhaps not
very successfully--to initiate me into the mysteries of musical
knowledge. You have at least taught me what difficulties and what
labor genius must bury in those poems which procure us
transcendental pleasures. You have also afforded me the
satisfaction of laughing more than once at the expense of a
self-styled connoisseur.
Some have taxed me with ignorance, not knowing that I have taken
counsel of one of our best musical critics, and had the benefit of
your conscientious help. I have, perhaps, been an inaccurate
amanuensis. If this were the case, I should be the traitorous
translator without knowing it, and I yet hope to sign myself
always one of your friends.
DE BALZAC.
MASSIMILLA DONI
As all who are learned in such matters know, the Venetian aristocracy is
the first in Europe. Its _Libro d’Oro_ dates from before the Crusades,
from a time when Venice, a survivor of Imperial and Christian Rome which
had flung itself into the waters to escape the Barbarians, was already
powerful and illustrious, and the head of the political and commercial
world.
With a few rare exceptions this brilliant nobility has fallen into utter
ruin. Among the gondoliers who serve the English--to whom history here
reads the lesson of their future fate--there are descendants of long
dead Doges whose names are older than those of sovereigns. On some
bridge, as you glide past it, if you are ever in Venice, you may admire
some lovely girl in rags, a poor child belonging, perhaps, to one of
the most famous patrician families. When a nation of kings has fallen
so low, naturally some curious characters will be met with. It is not
surprising that sparks should flash out among the ashes.
These reflections, intended to justify the singularity of the persons
who figure in this narrative, shall not be indulged in any longer, for
there is nothing more intolerable than the stale reminiscences of those
who insist on talking about Venice after so many great poets and petty
travelers. The interest of the tale requires only this record of the
most startling contrast in the life of man: the dignity and poverty
which are conspicuous there in some of the men as they are in most of
the houses.
The nobles of Venice and of Geneva, like those of Poland in former
times, bore no titles. To be named Quirini, Doria, Brignole, Morosini,
Sauli, Mocenigo, Fieschi, Cornaro, or Spinola, was enough for the pride
of the haughtiest. But all things become corrupt. At the present day
some of these families have titles.
And even at a time when the nobles of the aristocratic republics were
all equal, the title of Prince was, in fact, given at Genoa to a member
of the Doria family, who were sovereigns of the principality of
Amalfi, and a similar title was in use at Venice, justified by ancient
inheritance from Facino Cane, Prince of Varese. The Grimaldi, who
assumed sovereignty, did not take possession of Monaco till much later.
The last Cane of the elder branch vanished from Venice thirty years
before the fall of the Republic, condemned for various crimes more
or less criminal. The branch on whom this nominal principality then
devolved, the Cane Memmi, sank into poverty during the fatal period
between 1796 and 1814. In the twentieth year of the present century they
were represented only by a young man whose name was Emilio, and an old
palace which is regarded as one of the chief ornaments of the Grand
Canal. This son of Venice the Fair had for his whole fortune this
useless Palazzo, and fifteen hundred francs a year derived from a
country house on the Brenta, the last plot of the lands his family had
formerly owned on _terra firma_, and sold to the Austrian government.
This little income spared our handsome Emilio the ignominy of accepting,
as many nobles did, the indemnity of a franc a day, due to every
impoverished patrician under the stipulations of the cession to Austria.
At the beginning of winter, this young gentleman was still lingering in
a country house situated at the base of the Tyrolese Alps, and purchased
in the previous spring by the Duchess Cataneo. The house, erected by
Palladio for the Piepolo family, is a square building of the finest
style of architecture. There is a stately staircase with a marble
portico on each side; the vestibules are crowded with frescoes, and
made light by sky-blue ceilings across which graceful figures float
amid ornament rich in design, but so well proportioned that the building
carries it, as a woman carries her head-dress, with an ease that
charms the eye; in short, the grace and dignity that characterize
the _Procuratie_ in the piazetta at Venice. Stone walls, admirably
decorated, keep the rooms at a pleasantly cool temperature. Verandas
outside, painted in fresco, screen off the glare. The flooring
throughout is the old Venetian inlay of marbles, cut into unfading
flowers.
The furniture, like that of all Italian palaces, was rich with handsome
silks, judiciously employed, and valuable pictures favorably hung; some
by the Genoese priest, known as _il Capucino_, several by Leonardo da
Vinci, Carlo Dolci, Tintoretto, and Titian.
The shelving gardens were full of the marvels where money has been
turned into rocky grottoes and patterns of shells,--the very madness
of craftsmanship,--terraces laid out by the fairies, arbors of sterner
aspect, where the cypress on its tall trunk, the triangular pines, and
the melancholy olive mingled pleasingly with orange trees, bays, and
myrtles, and clear pools in which blue or russet fishes swam. Whatever
may be said in favor of the natural or English garden, these trees,
pruned into parasols, and yews fantastically clipped; this luxury of art
so skilfully combined with that of nature in Court dress; those cascades
over marble steps where the water spreads so shyly, a filmy scarf swept
aside by the wind and immediately renewed; those bronzed metal figures
speechlessly inhabiting the silent grove; that lordly palace, an object
in the landscape from every side, raising its light outline at the
foot of the Alps,--all the living thoughts which animate the stone,
the bronze, and the trees, or express themselves in garden plots,--this
lavish prodigality was in perfect keeping with the loves of a duchess
and a handsome youth, for they are a poem far removed from the coarse
ends of brutal nature.
Any one with a soul for fantasy would have looked to see, on one of
those noble flights of steps, standing by a vase with medallions in
bas-relief, a negro boy swathed about the loins with scarlet stuff, and
holding in one hand a parasol over the Duchess’ head, and in the other
the train of her long skirt, while she listened to Emilio Memmi. And
how far grander the Venetian would have looked in such a dress as the
Senators wore whom Titian painted.
But alas! in this fairy palace, not unlike that of the Peschieri at
Genoa, the Duchess Cataneo obeyed the edicts of Victorine and the Paris
fashions. She had on a muslin dress and broad straw hat, pretty shot
silk shoes, thread lace stockings that a breath of air would have blown
away; and over her shoulders a black lace shawl. But the thing which no
one could ever understand in Paris, where women are sheathed in their
dresses as a dragon-fly is cased in its annular armor, was the perfect
freedom with which this lovely daughter of Tuscany wore her French
attire; she had Italianized it. A Frenchwoman treats her shirt with the
greatest seriousness; an Italian never thinks about it; she does not
attempt self-protection by some prim glance, for she knows that she is
safe in that of a devoted love, a passion as sacred and serious in her
eyes as in those of others.
At eleven in the forenoon, after a walk, and by the side of a table
still strewn with the remains of an elegant breakfast, the Duchess,
lounging in an easy-chair, left her lover the master of these muslin
draperies, without a frown each time he moved. Emilio, seated at her
side, held one of her hands between his, gazing at her with utter
absorption. Ask not whether they loved; they loved only too well. They
were not reading out of the same book, like Paolo and Francesca; far
from it, Emilio dared not say: “Let us read.” The gleam of those eyes,
those glistening gray irises streaked with threads of gold that started
from the centre like rifts of light, giving her gaze a soft, star-like
radiance, thrilled him with nervous rapture that was almost a spasm.
Sometimes the mere sight of the splendid black hair that crowned the
adored head, bound by a simple gold fillet, and falling in satin tresses
on each side of a spacious brow, was enough to give him a ringing in his
ears, the wild tide of the blood rushing through his veins as if it must
burst his heart. By what obscure phenomenon did his soul so overmaster
his body that he was no longer conscious of his independent self, but
was wholly one with this woman at the least word she spoke in that voice
which disturbed the very sources of life in him? If, in utter seclusion,
a woman of moderate charms can, by being constantly studied, seem
supreme and imposing, perhaps one so magnificently handsome as the
Duchess could fascinate to stupidity a youth in whom rapture found some
fresh incitement; for she had really absorbed his young soul.
Massimilla, the heiress of the Doni, of Florence, had married the
Sicilian Duke Cataneo. Her mother, since dead, had hoped, by promoting
this marriage, to leave her rich and happy, according to Florentine
custom. She had concluded that her daughter, emerging from a convent to
embark in life, would achieve, under the laws of love, that second
union of heart with heart which, to an Italian woman, is all in all. But
Massimilla Doni had acquired in her convent a real taste for a religious
life, and, when she had pledged her troth to Duke Cataneo, she was
Christianly content to be his wife.
This was an untenable position. Cataneo, who only looked for a duchess,
thought himself ridiculous as a husband; and, when Massimilla complained
of this indifference, he calmly bid her look about her for a _cavaliere
servente_, even offering his services to introduce to her some youths
from whom to choose. The Duchess wept; the Duke made his bow.
Massimilla looked about her at the world that crowded round her; her
mother took her to the Pergola, to some ambassadors’ drawing-rooms, to
the Cascine--wherever handsome young men of fashion were to be met;
she saw none to her mind, and determined to travel. Then she lost her
mother, inherited her property, assumed mourning, and made her way
to Venice. There she saw Emilio, who, as he went past her opera box,
exchanged with her a flash of inquiry.
This was all. The Venetian was thunderstruck, while a voice in the
Duchess’ ear called out: “This is he!”
Anywhere else two persons more prudent and less guileless would have
studied and examined each other; but these two ignorances mingled like
two masses of homogeneous matter, which, when they meet, form but one.
Massimilla was at once and thenceforth Venetian. She bought the palazzo
she had rented on the Canareggio; and then, not knowing how to invest
her wealth, she had purchased Rivalta, the country-place where she was
now staying.
Emilio, being introduced to the Duchess by the Signora Vulpato, waited
very respectfully on the lady in her box all through the winter. Never
was love more ardent in two souls, or more bashful in its advances. The
two children were afraid of each other. Massimilla was no coquette. She
had no second string to her bow, no _secondo_, no _terzo_, no _patito_.
Satisfied with a smile and a word, she admired her Venetian youth, with
his pointed face, his long, thin nose, his black eyes, and noble brow;
but, in spite of her artless encouragement, he never went to her house
till they had spent three months in getting used to each other.
Then summer brought its Eastern sky. The Duchess lamented having to go
alone to Rivalta. Emilio, at once happy and uneasy at the thought of
being alone with her, had accompanied Massimilla to her retreat. And now
this pretty pair had been there for six months.
Massimilla, now twenty, had not sacrificed her religious principles to
her passion without a struggle. Still they had yielded, though tardily;
and at this moment she would have been ready to consummate the love
union for which her mother had prepared her, as Emilio sat there holding
her beautiful, aristocratic hand,--long, white, and sheeny, ending in
fine, rosy nails, as if she had procured from Asia some of the henna
with which the Sultan’s wives dye their fingertips.
A misfortune, of which she was unconscious, but which was torture to
Emilio, kept up a singular barrier between them. Massimilla, young as
she was, had the majestic bearing which mythological tradition ascribes
to Juno, the only goddess to whom it does not give a lover; for Diana,
the chaste Diana, loved! Jupiter alone could hold his own with his
divine better-half, on whom many English ladies model themselves.
Emilio set his mistress far too high ever to touch her. A year hence,
perhaps, he might not be a victim to this noble error which attacks none
but very young or very old men. But as the archer who shoots beyond the
mark is as far from it as he whose arrow falls short of it, the Duchess
found herself between a husband who knew he was so far from reaching the
target, that he had ceased to try for it, and a lover who was carried so
much past it on the white wings of an angel, that he could not get back
to it. Massimilla could be happy with desire, not imagining its issue;
but her lover, distressful in his happiness, would sometimes obtain from
his beloved a promise that led her to the edge of what many women call
“the gulf,” and thus found himself obliged to be satisfied with plucking
the flowers at the edge, incapable of daring more than to pull off their
petals, and smother his torture in his heart.
They had wandered out together that morning, repeating such a hymn of
love as the birds warbled in the branches. On their return, the youth,
whose situation can only be described by comparing him to the cherubs
represented by painters as having only a head and wings, had been so
impassioned as to venture to hint a doubt as to the Duchess’ entire
devotion, so as to bring her to the point of saying: “What proof do you
need?”
The question had been asked with a royal air, and Memmi had ardently
kissed the beautiful and guileless hand. Then he suddenly started up in
a rage with himself, and left the Duchess. Massimilla remained in her
indolent attitude on the sofa; but she wept, wondering how, young and
handsome as she was, she could fail to please Emilio. Memmi, on the
other hand, knocked his head against the tree-trunks like a hooded crow.
But at this moment a servant came in pursuit of the young Venetian to
deliver a letter brought by express messenger.
Marco Vendramini,--a name also pronounced Vendramin, in the Venetian
dialect, which drops many final letters,--his only friend, wrote to tell
him that Facino Cane, Prince of Varese, had died in a hospital in Paris.
Proofs of his death had come to hand, and the Cane-Memmi were Princes
of Varese. In the eyes of the two young men a title without wealth being
worthless, Vendramin also informed Emilio, as a far more important fact,
of the engagement at the _Fenice_ of the famous tenor Genovese, and the
no less famous Signora Tinti.
Without waiting to finish the letter, which he crumpled up and put in
his pocket, Emilio ran to communicate this great news to the Duchess,
forgetting his heraldic honors.
The Duchess knew nothing of the strange story which made la Tinti an
object of curiosity in Italy, and Emilio briefly repeated it.
This illustrious singer had been a mere inn-servant, whose wonderful
voice had captivated a great Sicilian nobleman on his travels. The
girl’s beauty--she was then twelve years old--being worthy of her voice,
the gentleman had had the moderation to have brought her up, as Louis
XV. had Mademoiselle de Romans educated. He had waited patiently till
Clara’s voice had been fully trained by a famous professor, and till she
was sixteen, before taking toll of the treasure so carefully cultivated.
La Tinti had made her debut the year before, and had enchanted the three
most fastidious capitals of Italy.
“I am perfectly certain that her great nobleman is not my husband,” said
the Duchess.
The horses were ordered, and the Duchess set out at once for Venice, to
be present at the opening of the winter season.
So one fine evening in November, the new Prince of Varese was crossing
the lagoon from Mestre to Venice, between the lines of stakes painted
with Austrian colors, which mark out the channel for gondolas as
conceded by the custom-house. As he watched Massimilla’s gondola,
navigated by men in livery, and cutting through the water a few yards in
front, poor Emilio, with only an old gondolier who had been his father’s
servant in the days when Venice was still a living city, could not
repress the bitter reflections suggested to him by the assumption of his
title.
“What a mockery of fortune! A prince--with fifteen hundred francs a
year! Master of one of the finest palaces in the world, and unable to
sell the statues, stairs, paintings, sculpture, which an Austrian decree
had made inalienable! To live on a foundation of piles of campeachy
wood worth nearly a million of francs, and have no furniture! To own
sumptuous galleries, and live in an attic above the topmost arabesque
cornice constructed of marble brought from the Morea--the land which a
Memmius had marched over as conqueror in the time of the Romans! To see
his ancestors in effigy on their tombs of precious marbles in one of the
most splendid churches in Venice, and in a chapel graced with pictures
by Titian and Tintoretto, by Palma, Bellini, Paul Veronese--and to be
prohibited from selling a marble Memmi to the English for bread for
the living Prince Varese! Genovese, the famous tenor, could get in one
season, by his warbling, the capital of an income on which this son of
the Memmi could live--this descendant of Roman senators as venerable as
Caesar and Sylla. Genovese may smoke an Eastern hookah, and the Prince
of Varese cannot even have enough cigars!”
He tossed the end he was smoking into the sea. The Prince of Varese
found cigars at the Duchess Cataneo’s; how gladly would he have laid the
treasures of the world at her feet! She studied all his caprices, and
was happy to gratify them. He made his only meal at her house--his
supper; for all his money was spent in clothes and his place in the
_Fenice_. He had also to pay a hundred francs a year as wages to his
father’s old gondolier; and he, to serve him for that sum, had to live
exclusively on rice. Also he kept enough to take a cup of black coffee
every morning at Florian’s to keep himself up till the evening in a
state of nervous excitement, and this habit, carried to excess, he hoped
would in due time kill him, as Vendramin relied on opium.
“And I am a prince!”
As he spoke the words, Emilio Memmi tossed Marco Vendramin’s letter into
the lagoon without even reading it to the end, and it floated away like
a paper boat launched by a child.
“But Emilio,” he went on to himself, “is but three and twenty. He is
a better man than Lord Wellington with the gout, than the paralyzed
Regent, than the epileptic royal family of Austria, than the King of
France----”
But as he thought of the King of France Emilio’s brow was knit, his
ivory skin burned yellower, tears gathered in his black eyes and hung to
his long lashes; he raised a hand worthy to be painted by Titian to push
back his thick brown hair, and gazed again at Massimilla’s gondola.
“And this insolent mockery of fate is carried even into my love affair,”
said he to himself. “My heart and imagination are full of precious
gifts; Massimilla will have none of them; she is a Florentine, and she
will throw me over. I have to sit by her side like ice, while her voice
and her looks fire me with heavenly sensations! As I watch her gondola a
few hundred feet away from my own I feel as if a hot iron were set on
my heart. An invisible fluid courses through my frame and scorches my
nerves, a cloud dims my sight, the air seems to me to glow as it did at
Rivalta when the sunlight came through a red silk blind, and I, without
her knowing it, could admire her lost in dreams, with her subtle smile
like that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Well, either my Highness will end
my days by a pistol-shot, or the heir of the Cane will follow old
Carmagnola’s advice; we will be sailors, pirates; and it will be amusing
to see how long we can live without being hanged.”
The Prince lighted another cigar, and watched the curls of smoke as the
wind wafted them away, as though he saw in their arabesques an echo of
this last thought.
In the distance he could now perceive the mauresque pinnacles that
crowned his palazzo, and he was sadder than ever. The Duchess’ gondola
had vanished in the Canareggio.
These fantastic pictures of a romantic and perilous existence, as the
outcome of his love, went out with his cigar, and his lady’s gondola
no longer traced his path. Then he saw the present in its real light:
a palace without a soul, a soul that had no effect on the body, a
principality without money, an empty body and a full heart--a thousand
heartbreaking contradictions. The hapless youth mourned for Venice as
she had been,--as did Vendramini, even more bitterly, for it was a great
and common sorrow, a similar destiny, that had engendered such a warm
friendship between these two young men, the wreckage of two illustrious
families.
Emilio could not help dreaming of a time when the palazzo Memmi poured
out light from every window, and rang with music carried far away over
the Adriatic tide; when hundreds of gondolas might be seen tied up to
its mooring-posts, while graceful masked figures and the magnates of the
Republic crowded up the steps kissed by the waters; when its halls and
gallery were full of a throng of intriguers or their dupes; when
the great banqueting-hall, filled with merry feasters, and the upper
balconies furnished with musicians, seemed to harbor all Venice coming
and going on the great staircase that rang with laughter.
The chisels of the greatest artists of many centuries had sculptured the
bronze brackets supporting long-necked or pot-bellied Chinese vases, and
the candelabra for a thousand tapers. Every country had furnished some
contribution to the splendor that decked the walls and ceilings. But
now the panels were stripped of the handsome hangings, the melancholy
ceilings were speechless and sad. No Turkey carpets, no lustres bright
with flowers, no statues, no pictures, no more joy, no money--the great
means to enjoyment! Venice, the London of the Middle Ages, was falling
stone by stone, man by man. The ominous green weed which the sea washes
and kisses at the foot of every palace, was in the Prince’s eyes, a
black fringe hung by nature as an omen of death.
And finally, a great English poet had rushed down on Venice like a raven
on a corpse, to croak out in lyric poetry--the first and last utterance
of social man--the burden of a _de profundis_. English poetry! Flung
in the face of the city that had given birth to Italian poetry! Poor
Venice!
Conceive, then, of the young man’s amazement when roused from such
meditations by Carmagnola’s cry:
“Serenissimo, the palazzo is on fire, or the old Doges have risen from
their tombs! There are lights in the windows of the upper floor!”
Prince Emilio fancied that his dream was realized by the touch of a
magic wand. It was dusk, and the old gondolier could by tying up his
gondola to the top step, help his young master to land without being
seen by the bustling servants in the palazzo, some of whom were buzzing
about the landing-place like bees at the door of a hive. Emilio stole
into the great hall, whence rose the finest flight of stairs in all
Venice, up which he lightly ran to investigate the cause of this strange
bustle.
A whole tribe of workmen were hurriedly completing the furnishing and
redecoration of the palace. The first floor, worthy of the antique
glories of Venice, displayed to Emilio’s waking eyes the magnificence of
which he had just been dreaming, and the fairy had exercised admirable
taste. Splendor worthy of a parvenu sovereign was to be seen even in the
smallest details. Emilio wandered about without remark from anybody, and
surprise followed on surprise.
Curious, then, to know what was going forward on the second floor,
he went up, and found everything finished. The unknown laborers,
commissioned by a wizard to revive the marvels of the Arabian nights in
behalf of an impoverished Italian prince, were exchanging some inferior
articles of furniture brought in for the nonce. Prince Emilio made his
way into the bedroom, which smiled on him like a shell just deserted by
Venus. The room was so charmingly pretty, so daintily smart, so full of
elegant contrivance, that he straightway seated himself in an armchair
of gilt wood, in front of which a most appetizing cold supper stood
ready, and, without more ado, proceeded to eat.
“In all the world there is no one but Massimilla who would have thought
of this surprise,” thought he. “She heard that I was now a prince; Duke
Cataneo is perhaps dead, and has left her his fortune; she is twice as
rich as she was; she will marry me----”
And he ate in a way that would have roused the envy of an invalid
Croesus, if he could have seen him; and he drank floods of capital port
wine.
“Now I understand the knowing little air she put on as she said, ‘Till
this evening!’ Perhaps she means to come and break the spell. What a
fine bed! and in the bed-place such a pretty lamp! Quite a Florentine
idea!”
There are some strongly blended natures on which extremes of joy or
of grief have a soporific effect. Now on a youth so compounded that he
could idealize his mistress to the point of ceasing to think of her as
a woman, this sudden incursion of wealth had the effect of a dose of
opium. When the Prince had drunk the whole of the bottle of port, eaten
half a fish and some portion of a French pate, he felt an irresistible
longing for bed. Perhaps he was suffering from a double intoxication.
So he pulled off the counterpane, opened the bed, undressed in a pretty
dressing-room, and lay down to meditate on destiny.
“I forgot poor Carmagnola,” said he; “but my cook and butler will have
provided for him.”
At this juncture, a waiting-woman came in, lightly humming an air from
the _Barbiere_. She tossed a woman’s dress on a chair, a whole outfit
for the night, and said as she did so:
“Here they come!”
And in fact a few minutes later a young lady came in, dressed in the
latest French style, who might have sat for some English fancy portrait
engraved for a _Forget-me-not_, a _Belle Assemblee_, or a _Book of
Beauty_.
The Prince shivered with delight and with fear, for, as you know, he was
in love with Massimilla. But, in spite of this faith in love which fired
his blood, and which of old inspired the painters of Spain, which gave
Italy her Madonnas, created Michael Angelo’s statues and Ghilberti’s
doors of the Baptistery,--desire had him in its toils, and agitated him
without infusing into his heart that warm, ethereal glow which he felt
at a look or a word from the Duchess. His soul, his heart, his reason,
every impulse of his will, revolted at the thought of an infidelity; and
yet that brutal, unreasoning infidelity domineered over his spirit. But
the woman was not alone.
The Prince saw one of those figures in which nobody believes when
they are transferred from real life, where we wonder at them, to the
imaginary existence of a more or less literary description. The dress of
this stranger, like that of all Neapolitans, displayed five colors,
if the black of his hat may count for a color; his trousers were
olive-brown, his red waistcoat shone with gilt buttons, his coat was
greenish, and his linen was more yellow than white. This personage
seemed to have made it his business to verify the Neapolitan as
represented by Gerolamo on the stage of his puppet show. His eyes looked
like glass beads. His nose, like the ace of clubs, was horribly long and
bulbous; in fact, it did its best to conceal an opening which it would
be an insult to the human countenance to call a mouth; within, three or
four tusks were visible, endowed, as it seemed, with a proper motion and
fitting into each other. His fleshy ears drooped by their own weight,
giving the creature a whimsical resemblance to a dog.
His complexion, tainted, no doubt, by various metallic infusions as
prescribed by some Hippocrates, verged on black. A pointed skull,
scarcely covered by a few straight hairs like spun glass, crowned this
forbidding face with red spots. Finally, though the man was very thin
and of medium height, he had long arms and broad shoulders.
In spite of these hideous details, and though he looked fully seventy,
he did not lack a certain cyclopean dignity; he had aristocratic manners
and the confident demeanor of a rich man.
Any one who could have found courage enough to study him, would have
seen his history written by base passions on this noble clay degraded to
mud. Here was the man of high birth, who, rich from his earliest
youth, had given up his body to debauchery for the sake of extravagant
enjoyment. And debauchery had destroyed the human being and made another
after its own image. Thousands of bottles of wine had disappeared under
the purple archway of that preposterous nose, and left their dregs on
his lips. Long and slow digestion had destroyed his teeth. His eyes had
grown dim under the lamps of the gaming table. The blood tainted with
impurities had vitiated the nervous system. The expenditure of force in
the task of digestion had undermined his intellect. Finally, amours had
thinned his hair. Each vice, like a greedy heir, had stamped possession
on some part of the living body.
Those who watch nature detect her in jests of the shrewdest irony. For
instance, she places toads in the neighborhood of flowers, as she had
placed this man by the side of this rose of love.
“Will you play the violin this evening, my dear Duke?” asked the woman,
as she unhooked a cord to let a handsome curtain fall over the door.
“Play the violin!” thought Prince Emilio. “What can have happened to my
palazzo? Am I awake? Here I am, in that woman’s bed, and she certainly
thinks herself at home--she has taken off her cloak! Have I, like
Vendramin, inhaled opium, and am I in the midst of one of those dreams
in which he sees Venice as it was three centuries ago?”
The unknown fair one, seated in front of a dressing-table blazing with
wax lights, was unfastening her frippery with the utmost calmness.
“Ring for Giulia,” said she; “I want to get my dress off.”
At that instant, the Duke noticed that the supper had been disturbed; he
looked round the room, and discovered the Prince’s trousers hanging over
a chair at the foot of the bed.
“Clarina, I will not ring!” cried the Duke, in a shrill voice of
fury. “I will not play the violin this evening, nor tomorrow, nor ever
again--”
“Ta, ta, ta, ta!” sang Clarina, on the four octaves of the same note,
leaping from one to the next with the ease of a nightingale.
“In spite of that voice, which would make your patron saint Clara
envious, you are really too impudent, you rascally hussy!”
“You have not brought me up to listen to such abuse,” said she, with
some pride.
“Have I brought you up to hide a man in your bed? You are unworthy alike
of my generosity and of my hatred--”
“A man in my bed!” exclaimed Clarina, hastily looking round.
“And after daring to eat our supper, as if he were at home,” added the
Duke.
“But am I not at home?” cried Emilio. “I am the Prince of Varese; this
palace is mine.”
As he spoke, Emilio sat up in bed, his handsome and noble Venetian head
framed in the flowing hangings.
At first Clarina laughed--one of those irrepressible fits of laughter
which seize a girl when she meets with an adventure comic beyond all
conception. But her laughter ceased as she saw the young man, who, as
has been said, was remarkably handsome, though but lightly attired; the
madness that possessed Emilio seized her, too, and, as she had no one to
adore, no sense of reason bridled her sudden fancy--a Sicilian woman in
love.
“Although this is the palazzo Memmi, I will thank your Highness to
quit,” said the Duke, assuming the cold irony of a polished gentleman.
“I am at home here.”
“Let me tell you, Monsieur le Duc, that you are in my room, not in your
own,” said Clarina, rousing herself from her amazement. “If you have any
doubts of my virtue, at any rate give me the benefit of my crime--”
“Doubts! Say proof positive, my lady!”
“I swear to you that I am innocent,” replied Clarina.
“What, then, do I see in that bed?” asked the Duke.
“Old Ogre!” cried Clarina. “If you believe your eyes rather than my
assertion, you have ceased to love me. Go, and do not weary my ears!
Do you hear? Go, Monsieur le Duc. This young Prince will repay you the
million francs I have cost you, if you insist.”
“I will repay nothing,” said Emilio in an undertone.
“There is nothing due! A million is cheap for Clara Tinti when a man
is so ugly. Now, go,” said she to the Duke. “You dismissed me; now I
dismiss you. We are quits.”
At a gesture on Cataneo’s part, as he seemed inclined to dispute this
order, which was given with an action worthy of Semiramis,--the part in
which la Tinti had won her fame,--the prima donna flew at the old ape
and put him out of the room.
“If you do not leave me in quiet this evening, we never meet again. And
my _never_ counts for more than yours,” she added.
“Quiet!” retorted the Duke, with a bitter laugh. “Dear idol, it strikes
me that I am leaving you _agitata_!”
The Duke departed.
His mean spirit was no surprise to Emilio.
Every man who has accustomed himself to some particular taste, chosen
from among the various effects of love, in harmony with his own nature,
knows that no consideration can stop a man who has allowed his passions
to become a habit.
Clarina bounded like a fawn from the door to the bed.
“A prince, and poor, young, and handsome!” cried she. “Why, it is a
fairy tale!”
The Sicilian perched herself on the bed with the artless freedom of an
animal, the yearning of a plant for the sun, the airy motion of a branch
waltzing to the breeze. As she unbuttoned the wristbands of her sleeves,
she began to sing, not in the pitch that won her the applause of an
audience at the _Fenice_, but in a warble tender with emotion. Her song
was a zephyr carrying the caresses of her love to the heart.
She stole a glance at Emilio, who was as much embarrassed as she; for
this woman of the stage had lost all the boldness that had sparkled in
her eyes and given decision to her voice and gestures when she dismissed
the Duke. She was as humble as a courtesan who has fallen in love.
To picture la Tinti you must recall one of our best French singers when
she came out in _Il Fazzoletto_, an opera by Garcia that was then being
played by an Italian company at the theatre in the Rue Lauvois. She was
so beautiful that a Naples guardsman, having failed to win a hearing,
killed himself in despair. The prima donna of the _Fenice_ had the same
refinement of features, the same elegant figure, and was equally young;
but she had in addition the warm blood of Sicily that gave a glow to
her loveliness. Her voice was fuller and richer, and she had that air of
native majesty that is characteristic of Italian women.
La Tinti--whose name also resembled that which the French singer
assumed--was now seventeen, and the poor Prince three-and-twenty. What
mocking hand had thought it sport to bring the match so near the powder?
A fragrant room hung with rose-colored silk and brilliant with wax
lights, a bed dressed in lace, a silent palace, and Venice! Two young
and beautiful creatures! every ravishment at once.
Emilio snatched up his trousers, jumped out of bed, escaped into the
dressing-room, put on his clothes, came back and hurried to the door.
These were his thoughts while dressing:--
“Massimilla, beloved daughter of the Doni, in whom Italian beauty is
an hereditary prerogative, you who are worthy of the portrait of
_Margherita_, one of the few canvases painted entirely by Raphael to his
glory! My beautiful and saintly mistress, shall I not have deserved
you if I fly from this abyss of flowers? Should I be worthy of you if
I profaned a heart that is wholly yours? No; I will not fall into the
vulgar snare laid for me by my rebellious senses! This girl has her
Duke, mine be my Duchess!”
As he lifted the curtain, he heard a moan. The heroic lover looked round
and saw Clarina on her knees, her face hidden in the bed, choking with
sobs. Is it to be believed? The singer was lovelier kneeling thus, her
face invisible, than even in her confusion with a glowing countenance.
Her hair, which had fallen over her shoulders, her Magdalen-like
attitude, the disorder of her half-unfastened dress,--the whole picture
had been composed by the devil, who, as is well known, is a fine
colorist.
The Prince put his arm round the weeping girl, who slipped from him like
a snake, and clung to one foot, pressing it to her beautiful bosom.
“Will you explain to me,” said he, shaking his foot to free it from
her embrace, “how you happen to be in my palazzo? How the impoverished
Emilio Memmi--”
“Emilio Memmi!” cried Tinti, rising. “You said you were a Prince.”
“A Prince since yesterday.”
“You are in love with the Duchess Cataneo!” said she, looking at him
from head to foot.
Emilio stood mute, seeing that the prima dona was smiling at him through
her tears.
“Your Highness does not know that the man who had me trained for the
stage--that the Duke--is Cataneo himself. And your friend Vendramini,
thinking to do you a service, let him this palace for a thousand crowns,
for the period of my season at the _Fenice_. Dear idol of my heart!” she
went on, taking his hand and drawing him towards her, “why do you fly
from one for whom many a man would run the risk of broken bones? Love,
you see, is always love. It is the same everywhere; it is the sun of our
souls; we can warm ourselves whenever it shines, and here--now--it is
full noonday. If to-morrow you are not satisfied, kill me! But I shall
survive, for I am a real beauty!”
Emilio decided on remaining. When he signified his consent by a nod the
impulse of delight that sent a shiver through Clarina seemed to him
like a light from hell. Love had never before appeared to him in so
impressive a form.
At that moment Carmagnola whistled loudly.
“What can he want of me?” said the Prince.
But bewildered by love, Emilio paid no heed to the gondolier’s repeated
signals.
If you have never traveled in Switzerland you may perhaps read this
description with pleasure; and if you have clambered among those
mountains you will not be sorry to be reminded of the scenery.
In that sublime land, in the heart of a mass of rock riven by a
gorge,--a valley as wide as the Avenue de Neuilly in Paris, but a
hundred fathoms deep and broken into ravines,--flows a torrent coming
from some tremendous height of the Saint-Gothard on the Simplon, which
has formed a pool, I know not how many yards deep or how many feet long
and wide, hemmed in by splintered cliffs of granite on which meadows
find a place, with fir-trees between them, and enormous elms, and where
violets also grow, and strawberries. Here and there stands a chalet and
at the window you may see the rosy face of a yellow-haired Swiss girl.
According to the moods of the sky the water in this tarn is blue and
green, but as a sapphire is blue, as an emerald is green. Well, nothing
in the world can give such an idea of depth, peace, immensity, heavenly
love, and eternal happiness--to the most heedless traveler, the most
hurried courier, the most commonplace tradesman--as this liquid diamond
into which the snow, gathering from the highest Alps, trickles through
a natural channel hidden under the trees and eaten through the
rock, escaping below through a gap without a sound. The watery sheet
overhanging the fall glides so gently that no ripple is to be seen on
the surface which mirrors the chaise as you drive past. The postboy
smacks his whip; you turn past a crag; you cross a bridge: suddenly
there is a terrific uproar of cascades tumbling together one upon
another. The water, taking a mighty leap, is broken into a hundred
falls, dashed to spray on the boulders; it sparkles in a myriad jets
against a mass that has fallen from the heights that tower over the
ravine exactly in the middle of the road that has been so irresistibly
cut by the most formidable of active forces.
If you have formed a clear idea of this landscape, you will see in those
sleeping waters the image of Emilio’s love for the Duchess, and in the
cascades leaping like a flock of sheep, an idea of his passion shared
with la Tinti. In the midst of his torrent of love a rock stood
up against which the torrent broke. The Prince, like Sisyphus, was
constantly under the stone.
“What on earth does the Duke do with a violin?” he wondered. “Do I owe
this symphony to him?”
He asked Clara Tinti.
“My dear child,”--for she saw that Emilio was but a child,--“dear
child,” said she, “that man, who is a hundred and eighteen in the parish
register of vice, and only forty-seven in the register of the Church,
has but one single joy left to him in life. Yes, everything is
broken, everything in him is ruin or rags; his soul, intellect, heart,
nerves,--everything in man that can supply an impulse and remind him of
heaven, either by desire or enjoyment, is bound up with music, or rather
with one of the many effects produced by music, the perfect unison of
two voices, or of a voice with the top string of his violin. The old
ape sits on my knee, takes his instrument,--he plays fairly well,--he
produces the notes, and I try to imitate them. Then, when the
long-sought-for moment comes when it is impossible to distinguish in the
body of sound which is the note on the violin and which proceeds from
my throat, the old man falls into an ecstasy, his dim eyes light up with
their last remaining fires, he is quite happy and will roll on the floor
like a drunken man.
“That is why he pays Genovese such a price. Genovese is the only tenor
whose voice occasionally sounds in unison with mine. Either we really do
sing exactly together once or twice in an evening, or the Duke imagines
that we do; and for that imaginary pleasure he has bought Genovese.
Genovese belongs to him. No theatrical manager can engage that tenor
without me, nor have me to sing without him. The Duke brought me up on
purpose to gratify that whim; to him I owe my talent, my beauty,--my
fortune, no doubt. He will die of an attack of perfect unison. The sense
of hearing alone has survived the wreck of his faculties; that is the
only thread by which he holds on to life. A vigorous shoot springs
from that rotten stump. There are, I am told, many men in the same
predicament. May Madonna preserve them!
“You have not come to that! You can do all you want--all I want of you,
I know.”
Towards morning the Prince stole away and found Carmagnola lying asleep
across the door.
“Altezza,” said the gondolier, “the Duchess ordered me to give you this
note.”
He held out a dainty sheet of paper folded into a triangle. The Prince
felt dizzy; he went back into the room and dropped into a chair, for his
sight was dim, and his hands shook as he read:--
“DEAR EMILIO:--Your gondola stopped at your palazzo. Did you not
know that Cataneo has taken it for la Tinti? If you love me, go
to-night to Vendramin, who tells me he has a room ready for you in
his house. What shall I do? Can I remain in Venice to see my
husband and his opera singer? Shall we go back together to Friuli?
Write me one word, if only to tell me what the letter was you
tossed into the lagoon.
“MASSIMILLA DONI.”
The writing and the scent of the paper brought a thousand memories back
to the young Venetian’s mind. The sun of a single-minded passion
threw its radiance on the blue depths come from so far, collected in
a bottomless pool, and shining like a star. The noble youth could not
restrain the tears that flowed freely from his eyes, for in the languid
state produced by satiated senses he was disarmed by the thought of that
purer divinity.
Even in her sleep Clarina heard his weeping; she sat up in bed, saw her
Prince in a dejected attitude, and threw herself at his knees.
“They are still waiting for the answer,” said Carmagnola, putting the
curtain aside.
“Wretch, you have undone me!” cried Emilio, starting up and spurning
Clarina with his foot.
She clutched it so lovingly, her look imploring some explanation,--the
look of a tear-stained Samaritan,--that Emilio, enraged to find himself
still in the toils of the passion that had wrought his fall, pushed away
the singer with an unmanly kick.
“You told me to kill you,--then die, venomous reptile!” he exclaimed.
He left the palace, and sprang into his gondola.
“Pull,” said he to Carmagnola.
“Where?” asked the old servant.
“Where you will.”
The gondolier divined his master’s wishes, and by many windings brought
him at last into the Canareggio, to the door of a wonderful palazzo,
which you will admire when you see Venice, for no traveler ever fails to
stop in front of those windows, each of a different design, vying with
each other in fantastic ornament, with balconies like lace-work; to
study the corners finishing in tall and slender twisted columns, the
string-courses wrought by so inventive a chisel that no two shapes are
alike in the arabesques on the stones.
How charming is that doorway! how mysterious the vaulted arcade leading
to the stairs! Who could fail to admire the steps on which ingenious art
has laid a carpet that will last while Venice stands,--a carpet as rich
as if wrought in Turkey, but composed of marbles in endless variety
of shapes, inlaid in white marble. You will delight in the charming
ornament of the colonnades of the upper story,--gilt like those of a
ducal palace,--so that the marvels of art are both under your feet and
above your head.
What delicate shadows! How silent, how cool! But how solemn, too, was
that old palace! where, to delight Emilio and his friend Vendramin, the
Duchess had collected antique Venetian furniture, and employed skilled
hands to restore the ceilings. There, old Venice lived again. The
splendor was not merely noble, it was instructive. The archaeologist
would have found there such models of perfection as the middle ages
produced, having taken example from Venice. Here were to be seen the
original ceilings of woodwork covered with scrolls and flowers in gold
on a colored ground, or in colors on gold, and ceilings of gilt plaster
castings, with a picture of many figures in each corner, with a splendid
fresco in the centre,--a style so costly that there are not two in the
Louvre, and that the extravagance of Louis XIV. shrunk from such
expense at Versailles. On all sides marble, wood, and silk had served as
materials for exquisite workmanship.
Emilio pushed open a carved oak door, made his way down the long,
vaulted passage which runs from end to end on each floor of a Venetian
palazzo, and stopped before another door, so familiar that it made
his heart beat. On seeing him, a lady companion came out of a vast
drawing-room, and admitted him to a study where he found the Duchess on
her knees in front of a Madonna.
He had come to confess and ask forgiveness. Massimilla, in prayer, had
converted him. He and God; nothing else dwelt in that heart.
The Duchess rose very unaffectedly, and held out her hand. Her lover did
not take it.
“Did not Gianbattista see you, yesterday?” she asked.
“No,” he replied.
“That piece of ill-luck gave me a night of misery. I was so afraid lest
you might meet the Duke, whose perversity I know too well. What made
Vendramin let your palace to him?”
“It was a good idea, Milla, for your Prince is poor enough.”