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pubOne.info present you this new edition. 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.

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819934783
Langue	English

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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 notset your name
at the head of one of the two tales I could neverhave written but
for your patient kindness and care. Accept this asmy grateful
acknowledgment of the readiness with which youtried— perhaps not
very successfully— to initiate me into the mysteriesof musical
knowledge. You have at least taught me whatdifficulties and what
labor genius must bury in those poems which procureus
transcendental pleasures. You have also afforded methe
satisfaction of laughing more than once at theexpense of a
self-styled connoisseur.
Some have taxed me with ignorance, not knowing thatI have taken
counsel of one of our best musical critics, and hadthe benefit of
your conscientious help. I have, perhaps, been aninaccurate
amanuensis. If this were the case, I should be thetraitorous
translator without knowing it, and I yet hope tosign myself
always one of your friends.
DE BALZAC.
MASSIMILLA DONI
As all who are learned in such matters know, theVenetian aristocracy is the first in Europe. Its Libro d'Oro dates from before the Crusades, from a time when Venice, a survivorof Imperial and Christian Rome which had flung itself into thewaters to escape the Barbarians, was already powerful andillustrious, and the head of the political and commercialworld.
With a few rare exceptions this brilliant nobilityhas fallen into utter ruin. Among the gondoliers who serve theEnglish— to whom history here reads the lesson of their futurefate— there are descendants of long dead Doges whose names areolder than those of sovereigns. On some bridge, as you glide pastit, if you are ever in Venice, you may admire some lovely girl inrags, a poor child belonging, perhaps, to one of the most famouspatrician families. When a nation of kings has fallen so low,naturally some curious characters will be met with. It is notsurprising that sparks should flash out among the ashes.
These reflections, intended to justify thesingularity of the persons who figure in this narrative, shall notbe indulged in any longer, for there is nothing more intolerablethan the stale reminiscences of those who insist on talking aboutVenice after so many great poets and petty travelers. The interestof the tale requires only this record of the most startlingcontrast in the life of man: the dignity and poverty which areconspicuous there in some of the men as they are in most of thehouses.
The nobles of Venice and of Geneva, like those ofPoland 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 becomecorrupt. At the present day some of these families have titles.
And even at a time when the nobles of thearistocratic republics were all equal, the title of Prince was, infact, given at Genoa to a member of the Doria family, who weresovereigns of the principality of Amalfi, and a similar title wasin use at Venice, justified by ancient inheritance from FacinoCane, Prince of Varese. The Grimaldi, who assumed sovereignty, didnot take possession of Monaco till much later.
The last Cane of the elder branch vanished fromVenice thirty years before the fall of the Republic, condemned forvarious crimes more or less criminal. The branch on whom thisnominal principality then devolved, the Cane Memmi, sank intopoverty during the fatal period between 1796 and 1814. In thetwentieth year of the present century they were represented only bya young man whose name was Emilio, and an old palace which isregarded as one of the chief ornaments of the Grand Canal. This sonof Venice the Fair had for his whole fortune this useless Palazzo,and fifteen hundred francs a year derived from a country house onthe Brenta, the last plot of the lands his family had formerlyowned on terra firma , and sold to the Austrian government.This little income spared our handsome Emilio the ignominy ofaccepting, as many nobles did, the indemnity of a franc a day, dueto every impoverished patrician under the stipulations of thecession to Austria.
At the beginning of winter, this young gentleman wasstill lingering in a country house situated at the base of theTyrolese Alps, and purchased in the previous spring by the DuchessCataneo. The house, erected by Palladio for the Piepolo family, isa square building of the finest style of architecture. There is astately staircase with a marble portico on each side; thevestibules are crowded with frescoes, and made light by sky-blueceilings across which graceful figures float amid ornament rich indesign, but so well proportioned that the building carries it, as awoman carries her head-dress, with an ease that charms the eye; inshort, the grace and dignity that characterize the Procuratie in the piazetta at Venice. Stone walls, admirablydecorated, keep the rooms at a pleasantly cool temperature.Verandas outside, painted in fresco, screen off the glare. Theflooring throughout is the old Venetian inlay of marbles, cut intounfading flowers.
The furniture, like that of all Italian palaces, wasrich with handsome silks, judiciously employed, and valuablepictures favorably hung; some by the Genoese priest, known as ilCapucino , several by Leonardo da Vinci, Carlo Dolci,Tintoretto, and Titian.
The shelving gardens were full of the marvels wheremoney has been turned into rocky grottoes and patterns of shells, —the very madness of craftsmanship, — terraces laid out by thefairies, arbors of sterner aspect, where the cypress on its talltrunk, the triangular pines, and the melancholy olive mingledpleasingly with orange trees, bays, and myrtles, and clear pools inwhich blue or russet fishes swam. Whatever may be said in favor ofthe natural or English garden, these trees, pruned into parasols,and yews fantastically clipped; this luxury of art so skilfullycombined with that of nature in Court dress; those cascades overmarble steps where the water spreads so shyly, a filmy scarf sweptaside by the wind and immediately renewed; those bronzed metalfigures speechlessly inhabiting the silent grove; that lordlypalace, an object in the landscape from every side, raising itslight outline at the foot of the Alps, — all the living thoughtswhich animate the stone, the bronze, and the trees, or expressthemselves in garden plots, — this lavish prodigality was inperfect keeping with the loves of a duchess and a handsome youth,for they are a poem far removed from the coarse ends of brutalnature.
Any one with a soul for fantasy would have looked tosee, on one of those noble flights of steps, standing by a vasewith medallions in bas-relief, a negro boy swathed about the loinswith scarlet stuff, and holding in one hand a parasol over theDuchess' head, and in the other the train of her long skirt, whileshe listened to Emilio Memmi. And how far grander the Venetianwould have looked in such a dress as the Senators wore whom Titianpainted.
But alas! in this fairy palace, not unlike that ofthe Peschieri at Genoa, the Duchess Cataneo obeyed the edicts ofVictorine and the Paris fashions. She had on a muslin dress andbroad straw hat, pretty shot silk shoes, thread lace stockings thata breath of air would have blown away; and over her shoulders ablack lace shawl. But the thing which no one could ever understandin Paris, where women are sheathed in their dresses as a dragon-flyis cased in its annular armor, was the perfect freedom with whichthis lovely daughter of Tuscany wore her French attire; she hadItalianized it. A Frenchwoman treats her shirt with the greatestseriousness; an Italian never thinks about it; she does not attemptself-protection by some prim glance, for she knows that she is safein that of a devoted love, a passion as sacred and serious in hereyes as in those of others.
At eleven in the forenoon, after a walk, and by theside of a table still strewn with the remains of an elegantbreakfast, the Duchess, lounging in an easy-chair, left her loverthe master of these muslin draperies, without a frown each time hemoved. Emilio, seated at her side, held one of her hands betweenhis, gazing at her with utter absorption. Ask not whether theyloved; they loved only too well. They were not reading out of thesame book, like Paolo and Francesca; far from it, Emilio dared notsay: “Let us read. ” The gleam of those eyes, those glistening grayirises streaked with threads of gold that started from the centrelike 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 crownedthe adored head, bound by a simple gold fillet, and falling insatin tresses on each side of a spacious brow, was enough to givehim a ringing in his ears, the wild tide of the blood rushingthrough his veins as if it must burst his heart. By what obscurephenomenon did his soul so overmaster his body that he was nolonger conscious of his independent self, but was wholly one withthis woman at the least word she spoke in that voice whichdisturbed the very sources of life in him? If, in utter seclusion,a woman of moderate charms can, by being constantly studied, seemsupreme and imposing, perhaps one so magnificently handsome as theDuchess could fascinate to stupidity a youth in whom rapture foundsome fresh incitement; for she had really absorbed his youngsoul.
Massimilla, the heiress of the Doni, of Florence,had married the Sicilian Duke Cataneo. Her mother, since dead, hadhoped, by promoting this marriage, to leave her rich and happy,according to Florentine custom. She had concluded that herdaughter, emerging from a convent to embark in life, would achieve,under the laws of love, that second union of heart with heartwhich, to an Italian woman, is all in all. But Massimilla Doni hadacquired in her convent a real taste for a reli