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Updated: June 16, 2025
"What have I done to make her ask that?" he wondered to himself. "Emilio, what letter was that which you threw into the lagoon?" "Vendramini's. I had not read it to the end, or I should never have gone to my palazzo, and there have met the Duke; for no doubt it told me all about it." Massimilla turned pale, but a caress from Emilio reassured her.
Massimilla appeared in her night wrapper, so much had she been alarmed by the tone of the Prince's farewell, and so startled by the hopes held out by the letter. "Madame," said the Frenchman, as he placed her in a seat and desired the gondoliers to start, "at this moment Prince Emilio's life is in danger, and you alone can save him." "What is to be done?" she asked. "Ah!
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.
While he was at Milan, the Italian sculptor Puttinati modelled his bust, which pleased him so much that he gave him a order for a group representing Seraphita showing the path heavenward to Wilfrid and Minna. At Venice, he began Massimilla Doni, one of his philosophic novels, in which the love episode is interwoven with mysticism and music, and Rossini's Mose is analysed with skill.
What gives its ravishing charm to this quintette is the return to the homelier feelings of life after the grandiose picture of two stupendous and national emotions: general misery, general joy, expressed with the magic force stamped on them by divine vengeance and with the miraculous atmosphere of the Bible narrative. Now, was not I right?" added Massimilla, as the noble sretto came to a close.
I should have understood Balzac better if he had said that the statues escape from their niches and the madonnas and the angels from their frames to gather round the bed of Massimilla to weep. Balzac's idea seems to have got a little tangled, or maybe I am stupid to-day.
This brilliant picture of the Parisian bourgeoisie had been published in December, 1837, under the title of "Histoire de la Grandeur et de la decadence de Cesar Birotteau." Since then, Balzac had produced nothing new in book form, though he was writing "La Maison de Nucingen" for La Presse, and working at "Massimilla Doni," and at the second part of "Illusions Perdues."
The boxes were in a ferment like the stir of swarming bees. One man alone remained passive in the turmoil. Emilio Memmi, with his back to the stage and his eyes fixed on Massimilla with a melancholy expression, seemed to live in her gaze; he had not once looked round at the prima donna. "I need not ask you, caro carino, what was the result of my negotiation," said Vendramin to Emilio.
The doctor, like the Duke, was struck by the expression stamped on the faces of the lovers, a look of pining despair. "Then does an Italian opera need a guide to it?" he asked Massimilla, with a smile.
To Vendramin Emilio's despair seemed so nearly allied to madness that he promised to cure him completely if only he would give him carte blanche to deal with Massimilla. This ray of hope came just in time to save Emilio from drowning himself that night; for, indeed, as he remembered the singer, he felt a horrible wish to go back to her.
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