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Unlike Pygmalion's fable, the more Bellina writes, the more petrified Goethe becomes, the more glacial his letters. True, if Bellina had perceived that her sheets were falling upon granite, and if she had abandoned herself to rage or despair, she would have composed a poem. In the rest of the criticism, Balzac swirls round his guns and directs his fire on Goethe's replies to Bellina.
It would seem as though there were an attack on her aloofness in the long criticism he sent her from his lodgings on Madame d'Arnim's Bellina, a French translation of which had been published not long before he left Paris.
A few have more than this. Here lie the two brothers Bellina in one grave, with a cross at their head and another, rougher and larger, at their feet, announcing simply, "I due fratelli," "the two brothers." And here is a tombstone engraved with an anchor, for one who, very early in the war, was hit while fording the Isonzo in face of the enemy's fire.
My principal recollections connected with the place were the superior moral excellence of one of these damsels, E B , who was held up before my unworthy eyes as a model of school-girl virtue, at once to shame and encourage me; Bellina Grimani's sweet face and voice; some very fine cedar trees on the lawn, and a picture in the drawing-room of Prospero with his three-year-old Miranda in a boat in the midst of a raging sea, which work of art used to shake my childish bosom with a tragical passion of terror and pity, invariably ending in bitter tears.
The vindictive curiosity of the questioning women, intent on their rings, brought out her eager defense of her mother, the effort to explain away the ugly fact that that Mr. Jasper was married. She saw Linda descending the marble stairs to the lower floor where the games were kept in a somber corridor, and heard a voice halting her irresolute passage: "Hello, Bellina."
But, Ilaria, you knew well what gave colour to the faint and worn old words about Fior di spin giallo, or O Dea fatale, or "O Dio de' Dei! La piu bellina mi parete voi; O quanto sete cara agli occhi miei!" And so the days passed in your square corner palace, until the plague came down with the North wind, and you bowed your proud neck before it like a mountain pine.
One of these, Bellina Grimani, a charming and attractive woman, who was at one time attached to the household of the ill-fated and ill-conducted Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales, died young and single. The elder Miss Grimani married a Mr. H within a few years.
The hall was dull, no one was clicking the balls about the green tables, and a solitary sick-looking man, with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was smoking a cigarette in a chair across from the cigar-stand. He looked over a thick magazine in a chocolate cover, his gaze arrested by her irresolute passage. "Hello, Bellina," he said. She stopped. "Linda," she corrected him, "Linda Condon."
"Yes, Bellina is in spirits, but she will not run away from Giovanni," he said, trying not to seem surprised that she should curtail their drive. They crossed the wide gravelled space outside the gardens and walked towards the town by the Lung'Arno.
All girls and what else was Vanna, a wife in name? walked there arm in arm. Others walked there also, she must know. By-and-by some pretty lad, an archer, perhaps, from the palace, some roistering blade of a gentleman's lackey, a friar or twinkling monk out for a frolic, came along with an "Eh, la bellina!" and then there was another arm at work.
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