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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.
"Stay with me all day; we will go to the opera together. We will not set out for Friuli; your presence will no doubt enable me to endure Cataneo's," said Massimilla. Though this would be torment to her lover's soul, he consented with apparent joy.
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.
His works abound in references to his beloved art, and when he was writing "Massimilla Doni" he employed a professional musician to instruct him about it. Beethoven, in particular, he speaks of with the utmost enthusiasm, and after hearing his "Symphony in Ut mineur," he says that the great musician is the only person who makes him feel jealous, and that he prefers him even to Rossini and Mozart.
Do you remember, dear reader, how Balzac, when he had come to the last page of "Massimilla Doni," declares that he dare not tell you the end of this adventure. One word, he says, will suffice for the worshippers of the ideal: "Massimilla Doni was expecting."
"Ay, sing!" exclaimed the Duchess, as she listened to the last stanza with the same gloomy enthusiasm as the singers threw into it. "Sing! You are free!" The words were spoken in a voice that startled the physician. To divert Massimilla from her bitter reflections, while the excitement of recalling la Tinti was at its height, he engaged her in one of the arguments in which the French excel.
She tossed a woman's dress on a chair, a whole outfit for the night, and said as she did so: "Here they come!" The Prince shivered with delight and with fear, for, as you know, he was in love with Massimilla.
"Is that gentleman drunk?" said the physician in an undertone to Massimilla, after looking at Vendramin. "Yes," replied she, simply. In that land of passion, each passion bears its excuse in itself, and gracious indulgence is shown to every form of error. The Duchess sighed deeply, and an expression of suppressed pain passed over her features.
The Frenchman did as every Frenchman does on all occasions: he laughed. Vendramin, who took the matter very seriously, was angry; but he was mollified when the disciple of Majendie, of Cuvier, of Dupuytren, and of Brossais assured him that he believed he could cure the Prince of his high-flown raptures, and dispel the heavenly poetry in which he shrouded Massimilla as in a cloud.
"How eagerly Capraja, with his passion for embellishments, must have looked forward to this air, which derives all its value from execution," remarked Massimilla. "Here Rossini has, so to speak, given the reins over to the singer's fancy. Her cadenzas and her feeling are everything. With a poor voice or inferior execution, it would be nothing the throat is responsible for the effects of this aria.
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