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Updated: June 16, 2025
"My dear, love that poor Emilio," said the Signora Vulpato to Massimilla, as they met on the stairs in going out. "I do love him with all my might," replied the Duchess. "Then why does not he look happy?" Massimilla's reply was a little shrug of her shoulders.
"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.
He felt on his heart the trickle of pearls, dropped there by an angel; he woke, and found himself bathed in the tears of Massimilla Doni. He was lying in her arms, and she gazed at him as he slept. That evening, at the Fenice, though la Tinti had not allowed him to rise till two in the afternoon, which is said to be very bad for a tenor voice, Genovese sang divinely in his part in Semiramide.
Massimilla, feeling that her strength lay in the absence of any sensual side to her love, could allow herself to be expansive; she boldly and confidently poured out her angelic spirit, she stripped it bare, just as during that diabolical night, La Tinti had displayed the soft lines of her body, and her firm, elastic flesh.
The transcendental vision of Massimilla was eclipsed, just as the idea of God is sometimes hidden by clouds of doubt in the consciousness of solitary thinkers. Clarina thought herself the happiest woman in the world as she perceived Emilio was in love with her.
He fancied that he could hear an angelic chorus of voices, and he would have given his life to feel the fire of passion which at this hour last night had filled him for the odious Clarina; but he was at the moment hardly conscious of having a body. Massimilla, much distressed, ascribed this tear, in her guilelessness, to the remark she had made as to Genovese's cavatina.
Thus at the end of the opera, Emilio and Massimilla were alone, and holding hands they listened together to the duet that finishes Il Barbiere. "There is nothing but music to express love," said the Duchess, moved by that song as of two rapturous nightingales.
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.
"Why should I not approve of a system of government which, by depriving us of books and odious politics, leaves men entirely to us?" "I had thought that the Italians were more patriotic," said the Frenchman. Massimilla laughed so slyly that her interlocutor could not distinguish mockery from serious meaning, nor her real opinion from ironical criticism. "Then you are not a liberal?" said he.
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!
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